


The Waves Above Us

by lobst_r



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Angst and Feels, Antifascist Steve, Atheism, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bread and Roses, Communist Bucky, Drug Use, Everyone Has Issues, Great Depression, M/M, Mental Instability, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, POV Multiple, Pining, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Racism, Sam Has Issues, Self Harm, Sex Toys, Socialist Steve, Socialist Steve ftw, Solidarity Forever, Suicide Attempt, steve pining, unionism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-15 07:24:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11801256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lobst_r/pseuds/lobst_r
Summary: Steve Rogers looks for death, that elusive fucker dodging him left and right. He stares at walls, talks to ghosts and smokes a boatload of weed. He has a homeless friend who sells stuff on the sidewalk. He eats greasy burgers and barbecue chips. He works for S.H.I.E.L.D., because why the hell not? Yet, unwittingly, there are several things he rediscovers: communism, sex, and then, unbowed, unbroken and very much unhinged, the only equal to his insanity: Bucky Barnes.---Or: Jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, a road trip through Europe, fucking up against walls and fighting over God and Marx.





	1. Waves Above Us, or: All the Strange Beginnings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is part of the 2017 Stucky Big Bang, which means that amazing people did amazing artwork for my rambling, confused story. There's [sallysparrow017](http://sallysparrow017.parakaproductions.com/images/spectral.jpg) and [Sundae Cherries](http://sundaecherries.tumblr.com/post/164332221968/the-waves-above-us). Both are so, so gorgeous. Also big thanks to Amber, who beta-read my story and gave me pointers like nobody's business.

_ALL THE BONES_

 

As all things do, it starts and ends with the sea.

 

In its lapping, bluey waves chasing one another rest the bones of the bygones and the stories they told, teeth chat-chattering through the rush of frothy bubbles. They like to speak on about the Great Hunger, prattling over potato peels and spindly legs, gnawing and biting and wailing.

The blight that festered the plants in our soil whispers beneath the waves, beckoning, and we go, never learning to stop.

 

Ah, _farraige_ , how gently you pull, how very gently, and snug in your embrace of salt water and tears sit the vessels of plank and wood, of steel and coal, mighty yet small.

 

Little Sarah Rogers, look at her, look at her all pretty and packed, riding the waves and whispering to herself, _Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me_ , she whispers, little Sarah does.

 

Ah, _farraige, farraige mhór_ , all the bones, the stories, they’re all yours, all yours.

 

Little Sarah, look at her, with her husband gone to the war, in her damp undershirts and her dry eyes, merely an inkling, a dot of life in her belly.

 

As all things do, it starts and ends with the sea.

 

*

 

There was nothing when he woke up.

 

The cars, smooth and polished, they honked, and billboards flickered and switched. People spoke to their neatly squared telephones and hurried down the sidewalks on rubbery plastic soles. His kitchen cupboard was stocked with different cans and packages and cartons, and in his ice box sat ears of corn, chicken breast neatly pre-sliced and bottles of light beer.

 

Sometimes his strangely large hands would tremble, as he reached out to touch a smooth granite surface, or skim his knuckles across the dull gloss of the leather couch they gave him. At times, it felt more like he was the one given to the apartment – the modern furnishing, the metallic sheen of the kitchen, the potted palm tree, it all belonged, it all had to suffer his displaced presence.

 

The shield, unblemished and gleaming, they hung on the wall like a centrepiece at an art gallery.

 

On the third day after his return, he folded his hands in his lap and prayed for them to put him back into the ice.

 

*

 

Sarah, little Sarah Rogers, mother of one and wife to none.

 

Lad, look at me, look at your Mam, I love you to bits, you hear me? I love your toes, your poking ribs and your coughs at night, _Jesus, Mary, Joseph_ , I love your coughs at night, for they tell me you are whole and real and here.

 

Outside, the world is churning and the streets are a bustle of foreign tongues, the dim glow of gas lamps and the spit and phlegm of dusty lungs. There lives no mercy in this world, not for the ones born weak and curious, the ones born into dirt and poverty and a warm embrace.

 

Little Sarah, breaking her back, asleep on her feet, hands busy, mind reeling. Where will she go? How will she pay? Bread and butter and salt for the table, cabbage for stew and a penny for Bushmills. That’s how a woman gets by on her own, with wiry arms and flattened lips, her head held high with fear and with pride.

 

Lad, look at me, look at your Mam. Never let them shame you for the holes in your shoes or the skin on your knees, the food between your teeth. Shame on them who put their heels down when we’re prone. The worker’s back is the one upon which they stand, to toil the fields, oil the factories and sweep the chimneys. Without us they’ve naught, without us they’ll fall.

 

Sarah Rogers, a woman grown, mother of one and wife to none, she sings, she asks, _yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong._ Little Sarah, look at her, she takes her lad by the hands and leads him to and fro, singing _solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong._

 

Lad, look at me, look at your Mam, I love you to bits, you hear me?

 

*

 

Three months in, they hosted a charity gala and named him the guest of honor.

 

S.H.I.E.L.D. provided him with a jet black tailored tuxedo, dress shoes that pinched his toes and sent a barber to his assigned apartment to trim back the hair on his nape. It was his very first public appearance since they forced him out of the ice, a national treasure uncovered, the star-spangled man with a plan alive and well.

 

He smiled at the agents that escorted him to the limousine, and continued to smile all the way to the venue, even though he was alone in the backseat. His cheeks ached with the effort as he walked down a red carpet, past a surge of flashing camera lights and the deafening roar of the crowd. He ceased to feel anything at all once he was placed at a table and left by himself with the murmuring, pointing and staring.

 

He met a number of charming ladies. He met Howard Stark’s son Anthony and his companion Colonel James Rhodes. He met the mayor of New York and numerous senators. He even met the president himself, shaking his hand and speaking in a deep voice, pleasantries without content and large grins without zeal.

 

He managed to taste a few bites of the six course meal they placed in front of him and even gave a well-timed laugh. From the corner of his eye he saw how the agents guarding the entrances shifted, adjusting weapons beneath their suit jackets, eyes scanning the grandeur of the ballroom methodically.

 

He kept on smiling all the way back.

 

Once they had taken him up to the apartment, he headed into the large, tiled bathroom and locked the door. The bathtub he filled with luke-warm water, gentle to the touch, before he retrieved the straight razor from its shelf and got into the tub still clothed in his tuxedo.

 

The swish of water calmed him. He raised his left wrist, cutting a vertical line along the crawl of blueish veins, deep and sure. The pain was dull and a pleasant surprise, the first thing that had stirred him in the whole three months since he was brought back. He then opened his right wrist as well, fingers slipping with blood on the silver blade.

 

Gliding under the pinkish haze of the bath water, he let his smile go and felt nothing more than relief.

 

He woke again when the morning sunlight streamed through the crisp white curtains of the bathroom window. His skin felt clammy and rough, the tips of his fingers wrinkled and dehydrated. The water, a clear red not unlike the fancy foreign juice in his kitchen, had turned icy cold over the few hours he had been out. On his wrists the thin red lines were already healing.

 

An awful, ugly sob clawed its way up his throat, and he quickly sank under to garble it into the water. It left a metallic, bitter tang behind his teeth, and he eventually sat up again, draining the bath and turning on a hot shower to wash away any traces of that might have been left.

 

*

 

Oh, Sarah, litte Sarah Rogers, you’ve tried this world and you’ve found it lacking.

 

There’s your lad, feverish but nonetheless bright, frail as a bird but tough as a hide. The waves might take him, any night, but you hold on with all that you are, you hold on and whisper, _mo chuisle_ , pulse of my body, look at your Mam. Look at her.

 

Sarah, little Sarah, the clothes on your back, the bread in your stomach, the comfort of your lodging, it could all be gone, with the blink of an eye and the stretch of a second. How cheap your life is, how very cheap we all are.

 

*

 

He tried again, a week after his first botched attempt.

 

He upped the water temperature and made the cuts deeper and longer, with a slim kitchen knife instead of his razor. This time, he was gone long enough to dream.

 

Lodged between his long, peaceful sleep in the sea and the days of his childhood were his years at war. Glorious, sunlit days. Snowy days, dull grey and fading at the edges. If there was ever a time he was truly happy, those must be it, or so he dreamed.

 

He didn’t mind the bloodshed, or the smell of burned meat in the air. He didn’t mind the piles of bodies or the stench of piss and fear. He didn’t even mind the gaunt flicker in Bucky’s eyes.

 

Or so he dreamed.

 

He woke up to the beeping of hospital machinery and the busy clatter of a nurse pushing a cart. His hands, heavily bandaged, were cuffed to the bed, and on a hard wooden stool, wearing a stiff, practiced expression, sat Nicholas J. Fury. His one eye flicked to him and stared on unblinkingly for a few moments.

 

He closed his eyes again and tried to chase the dream before it vanished, lingering at the murky edges of his consciousness. They had been in the woods, somewhere or other, and the night’s frost had only just melted under the glaring winter sun. He had been content, with Bucky warm at his side and Peggy Carter’s smiling eyes in his sketchbook. He had been content and his breath had fogged in twirling, crystalline patterns.

 

Or so he had dreamed.

 

When he came to again, Fury was gone. But the message had been more than clear: he was not allowed death.

 

*

 

Look at him, Sarah, _do chuisle_ , walking with his head bent, eyes far away. Your lad, how he’s grown, grown into himself, into something else. The war tore out his innards, he is as hollow as he is alone, so utterly alone.

 

Ah, little Sarah, look at your lad, standing atop the steel and wire spanning the East River, murmering his prayers as you’ve taught him, _Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,_ he mumbles into his cavities of loss. A prayer for another voyage, may he find what he so craves, may he find the ice.

 

Look at him, Sarah Rogers, look at your lad. A drop of a few hundred feet, and he’ll be with the waves, the bones and stories.

 

As all things do, it starts and ends with the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_BLANKS_

 

She was to monitor him.

 

Fury sent her videos taken from different vantage points, which she watched on her tablet during the early evening hours. Brooklyn Bridge, in its entirety, spanning 1,595.5 feet. Heavy traffic, the center pedestrian walkway had people strolling by in the pleasant afternoon sunshine.

 

Then a figure appeared, falling with its arms and legs spread. Within seconds it was gone.

 

Natalia backed up the video and enlarged the sequence until the featureless figure gained a grainy face and a head of blonde hair that reflected the light. Steven G. Rogers had his eyes closed, his back taut as a bow, completely in control of his limbs. With his third suicide attempt, he had achieved a broken leg, fractured ribs and considerable head trauma. The sweet mercy of death, which he had obviously been chasing, remained elusive.

 

Erskine’s serum still held true to its promise.

 

In another video Natalia was able to zoom in close enough to read his lips. Rogers seemed to be in frevent prayer, his brows slightly furrowed, expression focussed in the midst of his free fall.

 

Natalia put her tablet away and carried on to open a bottle of Sauvignon and heat up some leftover pierogi in the microwave. She hummed to herself while watching the plate spin, wine sloshing around softly in the tall glass.

 

*

 

She decided to go with her usual approach.

 

A pale peach blouse, medium-length denim skirt and flat ballerinas that kept her at her natural height. Her red hair was stuffed into a casual bun, the lipstick she applied was rosy pink, barely there but very effective.

 

It was almost comical how men responded to her. How they were geared towards underestimating her, eyeing at the hint of cleavage, accepting her sweet smiles with entitlement. At the right moments, they would speak to one another over her head, careless with her presence.

 

Remaining unobtrusive and forgettable was a key ingredient to espionage. In this world, where women were judged by their bodies like cattle on sale, Natalia was just pretty enough to please. But always nondescript.

 

She planned her encounter with S. Rogers during one of his morning runs.

 

A bag full of school books on psychology weighed down her left shoulder, while she balanced three venti cups of lattes in her hands. He passed her by like a whirl of wind, tall, broad-shouldered and just a touch too fast for a normal jogger. He didn’t bump into her at all, barely even touched her, but still she stumbled a little and dropped one of her cups, accompanied with expletives.

 

“Oh, heavens, it’s quite alright, never mind me,” she rambled, pitching her voice just so, thinking briefly of the 1950s audio recordings of Margaret Carter she had listened to closely before bed. She held on to her other two cups and bent over with difficulty, making her limbs appear stiffer, more awkward than they were.

 

Without fail, S. Rogers turned and hurried to help her. Three weeks gone and there were no traces of his injuries left in his gait, powerful and sure. His face, however, gave her pause. He carried the closed-off expression of a man filled with hate, low and simmering, burning away all remnants of affection that might have survived time and ice. It was strangely dissonant from his sweaty, large palm that helped her up with surety and poise.

 

“Why, thank you.” Natalia told him, adjusting the strap of her bag, smiling wide with teeth

glinting. He didn’t respond in kind, only nodded tightly, his body language coiled around something that vibrated with tension.

 

He wouldn’t speak to her, not like this.

 

“May I, uhm, may I offer you a soy latte? They’re both without sugar, I’m afraid.” She dimmed her smile just a touch, eyebrows visibly pulling upwards with concern. “Of course, only if you’d like to.”

 

“Yes, ma’am, thank you.” He paused for a moment before cocking half of his mouth up in a facsimile of unconcerned pleasantries.

 

“Well, no one has ever called me that, so that’s a first, isn’t it?” She touched their cups together in a playful toast and sipped sparingly through the plastic lid. “I’m Natalie, a pleasure to meet you.”

 

“James,” S. Rogers replied, and for a moment his eyes dipped down to the curve of her hips. Then he shook her hand with serious eyes.

 

*

 

She could tell that he wasn’t done, not by far.

 

There was sweat cooling on his brow, but otherwise he seemed strangely unruffled by the furious sex that had taken up the better part of the morning. Natalia hitched her breathing a little, making the gasps audible and keeping her eyes wide, projecting surprise she never felt.

 

Her body, curved towards his with the knees slightly bent, was pale and utterly flawless save for a few thin, white scars, barely visible in the grand scheme of her curves and dips. Who knew what she would have looked like, without the shaping, the enhancements and the training. She could have remained a thin little Volgograd girl, gangly and awkward. Maybe she would have grown pudgy with time and a love for chocolates and _tula pryanik_.

 

As it was, her body was a blank slate, honed for a purpose, concurrently seductive and generic.

 

Slowly, she slid her hands over her heaving breasts, downwards, until they nestled between her legs and dipped into the slick heat, one finger, then two. She did not feel sore, she had barely even felt his girth during the vigorous fucking. Looking upwards, she glanced at the malfunctioning camera planted beside the overhead lighting.

 

She efficiently replaced the camera and planted several new ones at strategically viable positions while he grabbed a quick shower. She smiled for him while saying goodbye, adding in nervous gestures just to break up the blankness that had settled over her like a mantle.

Rogers played along, but his eyes never quite met her’s. The coiled tension in his shoulders had receded for a few moments after his orgasm. Now it seemed to have returned.

 

*

 

Natalia thought about bodies. About the lumps of felsh, miraculously connected and held upright with spines, nervous systems and muscle fibre. Blank slates assigned with meaning, encrypted with all the weighty stares of the world.

 

*

 

She filed her report, and proceeded to take over surveillance with another agent.

 

Relevant footage was rewatched on her days off active duty, sipping tea from a chipped mug and waiting for her back-up phone to ring with a message from Barton. Sometimes she would attempt to use her vibrator, or rub at her clit with stiff fingers, feeling the moisture pool between her legs before giving up, the frustration a palpable, living thing inside her chest.

 

Rogers had apparently taken their encounter as a cue of sorts, because starting from May 19th he brought back women to his apartment almost on a daily basis. Sometimes there would be two or three on one day, and on Thursday the 25th he achieved a whopping six.

The feeds of his bathroom, livingroom and kitchen area proved to be eventless. S. Rogers invited his female guests straight to his bedroom, where now a large box of condoms sat half-empty. The other agent had reported his online purchase while Natalia had been in Tashkent, lying low, waiting for swift extraction that turned out to be a middle-aged taxi driver in his beat up Trabant 601.

 

She had been vaguely impressed with his Internet usage. She had assumed otherwise, before.

 

Watching him copulate became tedious very fast. He had a routine that, much like his morning runs, he followed with blind, stubborn anger. In a few rare occasions he would allow his partners to sit astride him, but in most cases he had them on their hands and knees, pistoning away from behind.

 

Natalia was certain that he closed his eyes every single time.

 

*

 

In her dreams, she was a plain, brown-headed woman in ill-fitting clothes, somewhere in Russia, having sex with an average partner. She would throw her head back and scream in ecstacy: “ _Ya tebya lyublyu!_ “

 

The orgasm would swell inside her, spreading through her limbs like the dulling sensation of a strong sedative. Her head would be muddled and she would feel loose and comfortable, tingling and aching and overwhelmed.

 

That other Natalia, the pudgy, boring woman with the balding husband, the Natalia she could have been.

 

She had the best sex in the world.

 

*

 

The start of June ushered in another encounter with S. Rogers.

 

Returning from Rostov-on-Don, having met Barton in Budapest on her way to Marseille, she arrived feeling a rare calmness that sat lightly on her shoulders, like little _Khokhloma_ birds, red and gold and ornamental. She had even slept for an hour or two on the flight.

 

Fury called her on her way home, redirecting the route towards the private hospital where S. Rogers was being kept after another attempt at suicide. This time, he had gone straight for the femoral arteries.

 

“His fucking miracle of a body has done the job for us again.” Fury told her, “you have until tomorrow to reassess.”

 

It seemed that there was nothing to assess. Rogers was out cold, pale and unmoving, the whites of his eyes showing where the lids had failed to close completely. Natalia flashed her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge at the disapproving personnel and settled on a plastic visitor’s chair, hands folded in a gesture of patience.

 

She had waited for 41 minutes and a few spare seconds when Rogers started to budge. His eyes remained unfocussed for a few moments, and his mouth formed a word, maybe a name, ready to call out. Then his gaze sharpened and flicked towards her, the recognition immediate.

 

They regarded each other for some time.

 

Then Rogers opened his mouth and croaked: “Might as well fuckin’ work for you.”

 

Natalia handed him a cup of ice chips, then helpfully picked up a piece with a pair of small tongs and placed a few between his parched lips. His hands and feet were bound to the bed with heavy restraints. “Very well,” she told him mildly.

 

Rogers sucked on the ice, then he turned his head away.

 

*

 

She dreamed of dancing.

 

Of graceful movements, full of control, tension rippling through every last muscle in her blank body while she reached upwards.

 

Occasionally she would allow herself to imagine a time where her body had been her’s, and her’s alone. But such a time was not part of her jagged memory, and without memory, it simply failed to exist.

 

Barton called her three days after S. Rogers formally agreed to join S.H.I.E.L.D. as Captain America. He spoke for hours, describing the food he had, the long days of waiting, the ache in his shoulders from lying low with his bow set.

 

She touched herself through the plain cotton of her underwear and hummed.

 

  


 

 

 

_THE CRACKS_

 

It’s six-thirty in the fuckin’ mornin’ and Donny’s up and about, sitting in his sleeping-bag with his fucked-up crooked shitshow of a spine propped against the piss-stained wall of his humble abode of the night. The late autumn sun is still a bright fucker, confused with the seasons and the global warming, thinkin’ it’s spring or some shit.

 

He slugs down some leftover soda and rolls himself a breakfast smoke before going ahead and arranging his items around the sleeping mat carefully. It’s slow work with the hand an’ all, but it’s been almost forty years now, and he manages just fine, thank you Mr. President, sir.

 

He takes inventory of his items, counting from left to right.

 

There’s his army medal of honour from 1971, blue ribbon sporting a yellowish stain. Then there’s three brand-new pairs of socks from Target, which were handed to him some months back, in neon yellow, dotted green and hot pink. Next to those is his late Uncle Mihai’s golden wrist watch, made in Vienna and brought to the US of fuckin’ A from Romania.

 

He has a couple more good ones, a set of porcelain bird figurines and an empty tobacco case that is obvious fake silver but still pretty neat. He sets up his poster, stuck to a piece of cardboard with duct tape, which reads, in his very own proud penmanship, “FUCK THE GOVERNMENT”.

 

Now, Donny’s pretty used to having his morning down time before the rush hour starts up with the business folks and the car honking, but this fine day begins with Captain fucking America stopping at his makeshift pawn shop and reading his proud cardboard poster.

 

They stare at each other briefly, while Donny puffs away on his cigarette stump and squints into the sun. Captain America looks disappointingly unremarkable out of his patriotic riot gear. He’s wearing sweatpants and a sweater with the hood up, slouching. But it’s him, and fuck Donny, but he hasn’t taken a single shot of smack since ‘88, his head is mostly clear these days. Sadly.

 

“How much for the watch?”

 

“Well, well, well, that one’s got a fuckin’ _long_ history, I couldn’t give ya a price. Great-Uncle carried it all the way across the pond, you understand. Sentimental value. It’s priceless, you get me. Material value, _also_ considerable, you understand.”

 

Captain America cocks an eyebrow, he isn’t smiling, but he sure knows how to haggle: “I’ll give ya’ twenty.”

 

“Now tha’s just insultin’, ain’t you some celebrity big-shot? Ain’t ya’?”

 

“Twenty-five, for your sentimental value.”

 

“Fifty and we’re talkin’.”

 

They stare at each other for another few moments, then Captain America crouches down before his neat row of items and regards them, one after the other. He sure is a big guy. Donny can’t remember ever seeing one so big, though Walt Morgan who served with him in Da Nang came close. At least in his spotty memory he does.

 

“How much for the socks?”

 

“Now those I’ll give ya’ for free, it’s part of my partiotic duty to keep your fuckin’ feet warm while you carry on those battles, ain’t it?”

 

Captain America snorts, not lightly, but a full-on snort that wrinkles his nose. He takes out a fifty dollar bill and hands it to Donny, before sitting down across from him and grabbin’ for the pack of loose tobacco and papers. Donny smokes without tips – if the cancer catches him first, all the merrier.

 

Donny waves his stump at him, and the Captain pauses before rolling him a smoke as well. They sit and inhale together while the sidewalk starts to become crowded with stressed working folks, coffee in hand, smart phones clutched like a fucking life-line.

 

“LISTEN UP NOW! PEOPLE! ABANDON YOUR EMPLOYMENT! STOP THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION! YOU DON’T OWE YOUR BOSS SHIT!”

 

Captain America glances at him, then he’s suddenly grinnin’ like a lunatic. He tugs at his limp smoke one last time before squashing it against the pavement. Then he clears his throat and starts bellowing along with Donny. It takes him a minute or so to realize that the good Captain is singing.

 

“SOLIDARITY FOREVER! SOLIDARITY FOREVER! SOLIDARITY FOREVER! FOR THE UNION MAKES US STRONG!”

 

“You can’t sing for shit,” Donny tells him, but he’s laughing so hard he’s having difficulties breathing. “That is awful. So awful. I’d rather go back to ‘Nam than hear ya’ wailin’ first thing in the morning.”

 

Captain America doesn’t let up, he’s standing now, looking passerbys full in the face, singing off key: “We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn THAT THE UNION MAKES US STRONG!“

 

Some people are stopping now, holding up their fancy little phones, filming and taking pictures. Quickly, a crowd forms, and a woman in her tan stilettos almost steps on Uncle Mihai’s watch. He starts shoving his items back into his rucksack, swearin’ when things don’t fit and stuff comes loose. Donny has a lot of shit for someone perpetually homeless since the 80s.

 

He’s rolling up his sleeping-bag one handed, using the stump to press down, when Captain America decides to stop.

 

“You wanna get a burger?”

 

*

 

Donny isn’t allowed into the burger joint the Captain picks, so he just waits outside while the big guy orders. It takes a while, and Donny seizes the time and rearranges his items and refolds his sleeping mat.

 

The Captain presents him with a grand total of ten bacon burgers, which they eat on the pedestrian walkway right in front of the restaurant. The staff pokes their head out a couple times, but Captain fuckin’ America has taken the hood down and he’s definitely recognizable now.

 

“You wanna tell me about your war?”

 

“You wanna hear about Viet-fuckin’-nam?” Donny chokes on his bacon burger, laughing again. “That’s a first, buddy, that’s a first for sure.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, why not? I wanna hear.” The Captain has polished off five of his burgers already, his mouth is oily with the grease and he’s glancing at Donny again. His eyes are strangely flat, like he can hardly bother to pretend that this morning is joyful and sunlit and full of life.

 

“Don’t know what to tell you, man.”

 

Donny swallows his last bite, stomach full but queasy. It’s not a nice feeling, but he’s gotten used to it, the large stuff-your-face meals after longer periods of nothin’ at all. Truth be told, he doesn’t want to talk about _his war_. He barely thinks about it, not consciously, anyways. He’s been sitting on the streets of D.C. for a couple decades now, and he’s gotten pretty good at ignoring shit.

 

Stares, taunts, insults.

 

“Listen, pal, settle down for a minute, will ya’?”

 

Captain America nods and opens the wrapper of another fucking burger. Once he’s finished, Donny moves them a few blocks over, to a quieter lane where an old guy and his bulking luggage are taking a nap near the dumpsters. He grins to himself quietly once he realizes that he’s probably the same age as old sleepyhead. Time flies like a bird on crack.

 

He digs around his own rucksack and tugs out the last of his weed, a decent indica. It’s all the drugs he does these days, besides booze and smokes, of course. Captain America is watching him silently, unconcerned with his surroundings. He takes the blunt without asking when Donny hands it over after lighting up.

 

“Ever had a good blunt like this?”

 

The Captain gives a curt shake of his head and inhales deeply: “No, I was too goddamn busy trying to kill myself, never had the time.” He exhales in a rush, eyes sliding closed. “I thought this morning, I thought, Steve, they’re not going to let you die any soon, might as well make a friend, get to know folks.”

 

They are both silent for a minute, while the guy behind his luggage snores.

 

“So you saw me, boring old Donny, and you thought, what? That poor guy looks fucked, I’ll try to buy his Great-Uncle’s watch?”

 

The Captain passes the blunt and says nothing.

 

“Listen, Captain Steve, Viet-fuckin’-nam is none of your business, but I’ll tell you, I went all smilin’ and faithful in my country, and I came back as a fucking – a fucking –“ Donny takes a hit and hands back the blunt, the Captain takes it with his greedy bacon fingers. “I came back and there was nothin’, alright? Nothin’. But it’s none of your fucking business.”

 

He’s angry, all of a sudden, that the national icon, the fucking picture of health and beauty, just barged into his routined day and is now sucking on his last blunt like a leech. Donny prods the guy with his stump and grunts. He’s suddenly too tired for words.

 

“I can feel it for a minute or two, then it flushes out of my system.” Captain America has his eyes closed again, and he’s blowing smoke through his nose. “Well let me tell you, pal, I wish I was dead. I wish I never joined the war effort. I wish I died of pneumonia in ‘34.”

 

“Why the hell are you talkin’ to me, man? What’s wrong with you?” Donny doesn’t want to know, truth to fucking God and all his holiness, he doesn’t want to know.

 

“If I were dead at least I’d be with Bucky. Wouldn’t that be something. Wouldn’t that be something?”

 

“Stop talking, man, stop.”

 

Captain America smokes up, and his eyes are blood-shot and tired. He doesn’t try to say anything again, and they sit listening to the soft snores of the other unfortunate old guy. Another one that just slipped through the cracks of the system.

 

Right through the fucking cracks.

 

*

 

A few days later Captain America pops up again, waking him in his sweet slumber, sweaty with his morning workout and sitting down across from him, hands already busy rollin’ up some smokes.

 

Donny coughs and spits and sips on his diet coke, his voice is rough with both screaming and disuse: “Good morning, D.C.! What a chipper fine day this is!”

 

“Listen, wouldya like to live in my spare bedroom?”

 

Donny almost spits out his precious coke again, he’s sure his eyes are bulging out of their sockets. “Are ya fuckin’ shittin’ me?”

 

The Captain just tugs on his smoke and looks him dead in the eyes.


	2. The Calm of Fishbowls and the Middle Grounds

_DRY LAND_

 

Steve shaved his head.

 

He shaved Donny’s first, because his decade old pony tail was a matted, solid tangle with rubber bands strewn in at random. By the time they were both bald as peeled eggs, the bathroom of his S.H.I.E.L.D. issue apartment was a disgusting mess of sticky hairs. He ended up hosing down everything with the shower tube.

 

Afterwards, he sat down at the kitchen bar in his soaked khakis and finished three blunts in half an hour.

 

Bucky, the obnoxious punk, sat down across from him and took off his uniform cap with a smirk. Steve wanted to punch his lights out, but instead, he rubbed a hand up and down his bald head and said: “Feels like ‘39 all over again, pal.”

Bucky snorted, his expertly coiffed hair coming undone, eyes half-lidded against the smoke Steve was blowing at him. “Yeah, you look like one of ‘em Nazis now, you little shit.”

 

“Madison Square Garden,” Steve told Donny, gesturing towards Bucky with his free hand, “in 1939, twenty-thousand Nazis. It was February, cold as anything, I had just recovered from the flu, still had the coughs, you see.”

 

Bucky scoffed at him, fingers beating an impatient rhythm against the hardwood counter top. He was clean shaven, the slight cleft of his jaw more prominent, and Steve remembered having to tilt his head back to see.

 

“He could’ve died, stupid punk.” His eyes were serious, and the steely blue of the clouded sky at dusk. “Anyways, tell Donny all about that fight you got yourself into, go on.”

 

“Well, you’re gonna think it was Nazis I punched, but you would be wrong.” Steve took a hit from his quickly dwindling blunt, savouring the rush that went straight to his head. “The CP, Communist Party, they withheld from the protests, even though they were in there doing the Hitler salute, going _Heil! Heil! Heil!_ ”

 

“You could hear it loud ‘n clear from outside,” Bucky added, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “The CP was Stalinist though, through and through, you oughta know that, Stevie.”

 

“That’s right, Buck, had little children on stage doin’ it, too. Now, what do two good Irish socialist lads like ourselves do? We joined up the eighty thousand folks demonstrating, and you have three guesses, Donny, who we clashed with.”

 

Steve turned to look at his newly bald friend, and found him sitting on the nice leather couch, hands halting in mid-motion, half way to rolling up a new smoke. He was looking at Steve with his eyes squinted, bushy eyebrows drawn.

 

“The police!” Steve yelled, “the fuckin’ police, of course!”

 

Donny opened his mouth, as if to speak, and then dropped his hand to his lap. His left arm ended in a rounded stump, just above the joint, where the heel of his palm should have been. Steve exhaled the smoke from his lungs in little puffs, eyes focussing on the strange absence.

 

“I’ll tell you what happened, Donny, Steve got his head busted up so bad he needed stitches up and down the left side of his thick skull. I shaved his entire head with my razor until it was gleamin’ bald.” Bucky was laughing now, open mouthed, and Steve wanted to sock him in the jaw.

 

“That’s right, Donny, Bucky here patched me up after the fuckin’ police cracked my head open against the pavement.”

 

Donny just stared. Then he nodded to himself, taking a big breath: “That’s right, Cap.”

 

Outside the window, the sun had already gone down, the moon a pale sickle against the night sky. It was bleak, but then again, these days everything was. Bald, skinny little Steve back in ‘39 had loved painting the sky, his mind idle while his hands worked in steady strokes, capturing the bleed of colour, the rush of time.

 

Steve felt the grin on his face stiffen, then he turned back towards Bucky. Only he was gone.

 

“Bucky’s an unreliable motherfucker, Don.”

 

That wasn’t true. Bucky was the only thing Steve had ever been able to rely on. If he couldn’t be there, he usually had his reasons. He never left Steve hanging, never.

 

“Whatever you say, Cap.” Donny’s eyes were downcast, and he was blowing billows of smoke out of the corner of his mouth, lips working like a desperate fish on dry land. “Listen, you wanna hear about ‘Nam?”

 

*

 

Steve enjoyed working with Romanoff, truly he did.

 

She did not talk to him beyond the bare necessities of what the assignment required. She never attempted to speak about their first encounter and the three orgasms she faked. Also, Efficiency seemed to be her middle name, and the tasks at hand were always over faster than usual.

 

He was relatively glad that she was the one they sent to take Donny in for questioning.

 

Bucky was in the back seat of one of the black cars, and Steve climbed in, smiling at his own state of undress. He was still in his sweatpants and the stained white tank top he had worn to bed the previous night.

 

“Fucking hell, Steve, you’re a disgrace, look at yourself.” Bucky grinned at him, soft and tired. He was in his blue military coat, frosted over at the propped up collar where he had been breathing in and out. Across his lap was his custom built rifle, and his fingernails had a layer of grime underneath.

 

“Shut the fuck up,” Steve told him, head a dizzy swirl. “They’re taking Donny in for questioning, because they _own me_ , you understand?”

 

“Steve, ya’ git. No one owns you, alright? You even got the muscle to back it up now, hey, hey, Steve, look at me, pal.”

 

Steve opened his eyes, and caught the look the driver gave him through the rearview mirror.

 

*

 

Donny was a riot.

 

Steve was full-on cackling behind the wide, tinted observation window, while the security personnel that flanked him and Romanoff shifted their stance in agitation. “You hear that, Natalie? You hear that?”

 

Romanoff have him a blank look.

 

Inside the white interrogation room, Donny was making animated hand gestures, talking at high-speed, only stopping to cough up his phlegm and swallowing it down again with a disgusting wet clicking noise. “So, yeah, ma’am, I’d say Mr. Captain America was pretty damn interested in my person.”

 

“Mr. Lerner, you were given an honorable discharge in 1975, is that correct?”

 

“As honorable as anythin’, ma’am. Shiny medal of honor from President Johnson himself, I’ll sell it to you for ten bucks. How’s that? How’s that?”

 

“You have been involved in seven major anti-war protests over the last thirty-five years.” The agent in charge of the questioning pulled out a folder with photographs, grainy reprints and screen-shots of Donny and his huge backpack, with banners and signs, standing among crowds or sitting down on pavement.

 

“NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR”, Steve deciphered from his position behind the glass.

 

Once the photographs were all neatly placed on the table, Donny started to laugh. He laughed so hard he was wheezing, tears leaking down the side of his weathered, tan face. He had nice, angled cheekbones, visible and striking with his hair gone. “Look at that, you dug up all my old pictures, can I keep them? Can I keep them? No offence, ma’am, you take yourself too seriously, you all do, goddamn.”

 

Steve chuckled to himself and glanced over at Bucky, standing at the back of the room, grinning, young and unconcerned even in the dimmed, blue light.

 

“God bless the US of fuckin’ A!”, Donny yelled, banging his stump against the table.

 

*

 

“You need to get out more, Stevie.”

 

Bucky was half-smiling with one corner of his mouth tugged up, making his cheek dimple. His hair was soft and loose, falling into his eyes, over the strong strokes of his dark brows. Steve was crouched on the wooden floor of his S.H.I.E.L.D. issue apartment, inching closer to Bucky every few minutes, refusing to blink.

 

“You always say that, Buck. I had loads ‘a girls.”

 

Bucky rolled his eyes, tilting his head back against the wall. His smile widened into something warm and familiar and gorgeous. Steve still refused to blink. Under the orange glow of the night-lamp, wearing the white, threadbare undershirt and patchy work-trousers from his job at the docks, Bucky looked real. More so than anything else that existed.

 

“That’s not what I mean, you know that. You should take a girl dancing, to the pictures. Hell, you can take her to some fancy art gallery, that’d be swell!”

 

Steve shook his head slowly, drinking in the sight of him. The little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His broad hands, always in motion, tapping away on his thigh. “You know I can’t, Buck. I can’t.”

 

“ _A mhuirnín_ , don‘t be like that. You remember what your Mam always called you? _Mo chuisle_ , Steven Grant Rogers, _mo chuisle_.”

 

“I have no pulse, Buck. I am nobody’s pulse. Everyone’s gone and dead.”

 

He turned his face away and closed his eyes. Hot tears were mingling with snot at the crook of his arm, and the dread welling up inside him made his lungs burn, even as he took large gulps of air. The pain was an abstract force, worming its way through his bones, to the very core of him, where it lay writhing and twisting.

 

When he sat himself upright again, Bucky was gone.

 

*

 

“If I asked you to help me kill myself, would you do it?” Steve asked Donny a couple days later over a breakfast of burgers and fries.

 

Donny just glanced at him, mouth downturned with a practiced ease.

  


 

 

  
  


_FOUR DISASTERS_

 

New York was a disaster.

 

If you asked Rosa why, she would tell you that she was not able to get into Manhattan for five consecutive days, and that was five days of minimum wage gone, rounding up a total of 440 dollars.

 

Miguel and Cisco had school fees coming up, Ari needed diapers, rent had to be paid and as it was approaching the end of the month, her mamá in Oaxaca was sure to be waiting.

 

“Your _abuelita_ walks to the post office twice a day starting from the 25 th , _cada mes_ .” She told her noisy children over dinner on the second day of her involuntary, unpaid leave. “What will I tell her, eh? Aliens and super heroes made the city collaps? _Vale_ , Stark Tower looks okay, does it not? _Dios mio_.”

 

They watched news reruns on TV while having _mole negro_ and rice, her boys making awed noises over the fighting and explosions that she heavily disliked. They showed a press conference with Tony Stark, that _carra de pero_ , and several others, talking about the wreckage and the death toll and the responsibilities.

 

Ari made gurgling noises against Rosa’s chest while she walked around clearing the table one-handed. Her boys scooted closer to the screen when Captain America appeared, eyes wide in their little faces.

 

“Ah, look at him, he saved everyone, yes, yes. But will he pay for food? Will he fly me to Stark Tower so I can clean?”

 

Miguel gave her an annoyed look while Cisco sighed heavily. They had become the biggest fans ever since the government defrosted the man some time ago.

 

On day four Rosa packed her garish blue cleaning uniform and walked all the way to Manhattan on foot. The boss had not been picking up his phone, and she wanted to be sure whether or not she would have work this month or the next. She had spoken to her mamá the night before, explaining that she could send nothing for now.

 

It made her feel heavy and foreign, despite the sixteen years she had been living in New York now.

 

The entrance area of Stark Tower was closed down, no one was seated at the reception, no lights were on. The side doors, which she usually used, were also sealed.

 

“ _Hijo de tu puta madre_!” she cursed, fists tight at her sides. Then she crossed herself quickly and thought guiltily of her mamá’s disapproving glare. Times hadn’t been good, no, there was no word from José Luis and her little Sofía was struggling in Los Angeles.

 

Now this whole alien business.

 

Abover her, the chopping sounds of a helicopter arose. Rosa tilted her head back, feeling dizzy and tired despite her days spent at home. The STARK logo was visible against the pale grey sky, red and gold.

 

They could always fly away, yes. They could fly away from the ruins and the people desperate for their day job, they could fly to a much better place. Any place where people could foot their bills without noticing was a good place.

 

After a few minutes, she turned and started walking back to the Bronx.

 

*

 

Rosa got back on her job on Monday, though she wasn’t given her paycheck until two weeks later.

 

She told Sofía, half in tears, while rocking Ari against her chest. On the computer screen, her eldest daughter cooed at the little girl: “Don’t worry, mamá, I’ll send you something, yeah? I’ll send it right away, you’ll have it on your account by tomorrow. Now tell me how my _hija_ is doing, how is my Ariana?”

 

Rosa spoke to Ari in soft, baby Spanish, pointing towards the computer, where Sofía was pulling faces to get her daughter’s attention. It did not work very well.

 

In the evening, with the TV turned off and her boys tucked in, Rosa sat herself down next to the single bed they shared and thumbed open the well-read booklet, clearing her throat. Cisco and Miguel looked to her in anticipation, even though they had heard the stories many, many times and more.

 

“Read us of _subcommandante Marcos_ , mamá, _por favor_!” they would say, even as little children of three or four.

 

“The sea shell of the end and the beginning,” Rosa read, squinting her eyes, pointing her index finger along the small printed letters. “In the _Lacandon_ jungle, in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas, there is a deserted village surrounded by well-armed military posts.“

 

Her boys had only started to comprehend the words, now that they were growing older. Sofía, her little girl, the only one that was born in Oaxaca, her interest lay with other things now. Somehow, she had turned out tall and gangly like her papá, and somehow, a dodgy _gringo_ had thought she would be perfect for the modelling business.

 

How excited she had been, her little Sofía, with the first glossy pictures of her posing in front of a white wall, wearing black all over.

 

She hadn’t asked after the Zapatistas in many years now.

 

*

 

Two months into spring, her paycheck was late again. It was a desaster.

 

Rosa was switched to late shift, which meant that she rarely ever saw her boys anymore, and _tía_ Mendoza from across the hall had taken in Ari for most of the time.

 

She liked working in the lobby the least. On the office floors she could chat on the phone with friends, or read for a bit during breaks, but surrounded by nothing but tall glass panes, she felt scrutinized. Like the boss was bound to walk in any time and call her lazy, good for nothing.

 

She was wiping away listlessly at a counter when a beeping sound alerted her.

 

It was a tall, white man in sports clothing, walking briskly with his head downturned. Outside, it was pouring down, and his grey sweater was soaked through, showing the bulging muscles beneath.

Rosa picked up her cleaning rag and walked back to the cart with the bucket and other utensils. The movements made the man go still, all of a sudden. Slowly, as if scared, he turned his face towards her, his body a single tense line.

 

“Good evening, sir.” Rosa said, her voice echoing in the empty hall, louder than she had intended. It made her cringe at her own accent.

 

A few moments passed in which neither of them moved. Then the man straightend, and brushed the hood off his head. His hair was military short and a transluscent blonde. His eyes stared ahead unblinkingly, flat and dead like a frightened cow.

 

“Good evening, ma’am, how do you do.”

 

Then he was turning away and bolting towards the elevators.

 

*

 

She saw him again at the end of April.

 

It was early morning and dawn had barely broken over the grey streets, just a tint of glowing orange, a hue of pink that reminded her of the sky over the rolling green waves in Mazunte, where her father’s maternal family lived.

 

The large, white man was dressed in a dark uniform this time, the left side of his face still smeared with some remnants of blood, a nauseating rusty color. He was dragging his feet like a petulant school child, eyes scanning the entrance area and landing on the far end, where Rosa stood with the cleaning cart, working on yesterday’s dried coffee spills.

 

He walked over, haltingly, as they watched each other with unblinking eyes.

 

It was strange that he had noticed her, not to mention remember their previous late-night encounter. People usually did not speak to her, did not look her in the eye. Her cleaner’s uniform, her dark complexion sufficed in marking her place at Stark Tower.

 

Rosa felt panic rising in her throat. The white man looked deranged.

 

“Good morning, sir.” She heard herself say quietly. How she hated this place, this job. Her mamá used to tell her that she had a beautiful voice, loud and clear, a voice made for cries of resistance and songs of good cheer.

 

“Good morning, ma’am.” The white man stood before her, hunching his shoulders. “Awful weather, isn’t it?” Rosa glanced outside, where the brief colors of sunrise had drifted into an oppressive layer of ashen clouds. “A disaster, if you ask me, sir.”

 

He smiled at her, a wan, watery smile, and then extended his hand for a shake. “Steven Rogers, pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

 

Rosa felt herself frown. The white man, his name, it all tickled something inside her tired head: “Rosalita Hernandez.”

 

He nodded at her and she nodded back, as if it conveyed some form of understanding. Steven Rogers opened his mouth, as if to say something, closed it again, like a fish speaking to its reflection in an aquarium. Stark Tower felt like a fish bowl to her, sometimes.

 

“Listen, Rosalita, would you like to get coffee with me?” Steven Rogers cleared his throat, eyes darting this way and that. “I have no friends in New York. I have a friend in D.C., but they’re currently keeping me from D.C.”

 

Rosa stared at him, uncomprehending. “You want to have coffee with me, at this tower.”

 

“Not here, it’s fuckin’ awful here, no. We could take a train to Brooklyn and sit in a nice restaurant.” He stood unmoving for a few minutes, eyes downcast. “I don’t feel real good about going myself, to be honest with you.”

 

“To Brooklyn?” Rosa asked, shaking her head now. “Sir, I have to get my granddaughter after work.”

 

“I could wait.”

 

He looked deranged, Rosa thought again. His eyes were glassy and the smile he had tacked on for the sake of the conversation was slipping away, leaving a stony mask. He did not look well at all.

 

“I’m sorry sir, I can’t.”

 

He nodded, and there was something frenzied and tight to his face now. To her dismay, he took a step closer, staring down at her: “Listen, Rosalita, listen, they won’t let me die. Please, listen to me, they’re trying to give me medicine, I can’t be sure what to fucking eat. They told me five times is too much, Rosalita. They said, twice with the wrist cutting, then Brooklyn bridge, the arteries, now this mess, they can’t let me live unsupervised again.”

 

Rosa backed away from the white man, Steven Rogers, her heart beating rabbit fast. She bumped into her cart, almost knocking over a bucket full of detergent. With a jolt, in her bodily panic, she realized who Steven Rogers was.

 

“Mr. Rogers, I’m going to ask you to step this way. Mr. Stark has been notified.”

 

With relief, Rosa saw that two men from security had appeared. They took Captain America by his broad shoulders, and he went with them. She didn’t dare breathe until the elevator had pinged and smoothly closed their doors.

 

*

 

She spoke with her mamá on the phone, chatting about nothing and everything. How were the neighbours doing? How was Juan Carlos? How were his chickens? Was the _jamaica_ in bloom?

 

In her mind, the large, bloodshot blue eyes of her children’s hero stared on and on.

 

Before hanging up, they sang together, over the crackling static of the international call:

 

“ _Ya se mira el horizonte_

_Combatiente zapatista_

_El camino marcará_

_A los que vienen atrás_ “

 

Her boys, getting ready for bed with their toothbrushes hanging from their mouths, hopped onto the couch, bellowing the words along while Rosa let her head fall back, singing with an abandon that had become foreign to her.

 

“ _Vamos, vamos, vamos, vamos adelante! Para que salgamos en la lucha avante!_ ”

 

Miguel and Cisco jumped around, waving their arms, delight and foamy toothpaste on their little faces, singing about the battles to come and the unity of the people, no trace of American in their voices. It soothed her, if only briefly.

 

*

 

Afterwards, standing at the window, she looked out into the blackish blue sky, and the unease settled in her very bones. She suddenly felt unsure of everything, of this country she had come to, where her children were growing up, far from all she held dear. Of her choices, leaving Oaxaca behind, leaving her mamá.

 

Then she decided to ask after the strange man, Steven Rogers, first thing in the morning.

 

 

  
  
  


 

 

A THING OF BEAUTY

 

It’s a quiet day, whatever week of the day it is.

 

Can’t hear anything yet, the nurses do love to tinker about with the cutlery before serving tea. Usually there is much more of a commotion. A strange thing, this quiet, it’s peculiar – you never do notice it, until someone makes a sound and all of a sudden it’s pressing upon your ears.

 

It’s the same calm that erupts seconds before a gunshot. Or an explosion of a greater scale. Oh, those were lovely. In retrospect, a lot of things tend to be.

 

I could do with a spot of tea.

 

What time is it? I’d love to know, though it is somewhat irrelevant, I suppose. They took away that hateful ticking clock, now I’ve no means left save for bothering the nurses. They are kind enough, yes. But they are also comparatively well paid for their wretched profession.

 

Edwin always had a handsome pocket watch, a golden one with engravings from his grandfather. It was so lovely, I think Harry has it now – God forbid he lost it or sold it for some sordid business. When did he last call, my Harry?

 

Goodness gracious, what is the time?

 

“Mrs. Carter, I have your tea ready.” It is one of the younger, new ones. She holds the tray like she’s carrying the queen’s own jewelry, that one. Why ever would she be so careful with things so mundane?

 

“You have visitors. Would it be okay if they joined you?”

 

“Yes, darling, do I look overly busy to you? I’m strapped to a bed with not much else to watch besides the window and the telly – I can assure you neither has entertained me greatly so far. Do send them in, now!”

 

She does half a fumbling curtsy, that silly child. And who do we have here? Harry and Elizabeth aren’t in the States. Sharon, that wonderful girl, she is mightly busy with her involvement at S.H.I.E.L.D., as she should be. Who do we have here?

 

“Steven Grant Rogers, what a delight!”

 

Why, he hasn’t changed a bit. Save for his dreadful haircut, of course. He is the same, as Erskine promised. God, Erskine, look at this, your genius narrowed down to one man, who lives and breathes and walks this earth, seventy years later. He is our joint success, he is the product of the Allied forces.

 

“Peggy. It’s good to see you. These are Agent Romanoff and my good friend Donald Lerner.”

 

Now, now, if this isn’t a Black Widow. Defected well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, smart girl. They gave her something or other, the Red Room, she looks much the same as she did ten years ago.

And this other fellow, he seems a tad shabby, does he not? Never mind, never mind, this is the most excitement I am allowed in my old age. They think I’ve gone daft, they read me the papers extra slow now, ha!

 

“A pleasure, a pleasure, darling. Come here, Steve, let me get a closer look, my poor eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

 

God help me, he does look the same.

 

“If only you’d been there, Steve Rogers. Certainly, I would have married you and had your children, but you would have done an even greater service for queen and country. You would’ve helped us shape history, Steve. The sun set upon us once the Germans surrendered.”

 

His face, God, not a single line. If only he had not been the single one, if only. The empire would not have dissolved so fast, ten, twenty, thirty years. All gone.

 

“Peggy, you look well.”

 

He had better not start crying on me, what is that croaking voice? We did not inject him with the serum just for him to go soft and weepy.

 

“India and Pakistan went first, of course. As if we did not develop them, gave them all the advancements they would have never achieved. Then there was the Suez crisis, of course, of course… Sudan, soon after. If only you had been there, Steve, it would have been different, I’m certain, very certain...”

 

They all stare at me with their big eyes, these young ones. The Black Widow, I would love to speak to her alone some times. I founded S.H.I.E.L.D., it is my legacy, my greatest by far, of course. The other fellow, I’d like to ask him of his intentions, I’ve always been a master of interrogation, Edwin said so, all the time. He would go: _Why, love, I barely noticed! And now you’ve all you wanted to know, a master of interrogation, indeed!._

 

Edwin, bless him, rest his soul, I do miss him so.

 

*

 

Heavens, I must have drifted off.

 

What are they whispering about, there, what in God’s name is it? Steve, he was here, was he not? I should call a nurse, ask her where the good Captain has gone to. Old age makes consciousness unreliable, it is not merely the bladder that malfunctions.

 

“ - you sure this is the love of your life, Cap? ‘Cause she was in a bit of imperialist nostalgia, hate to fuckin’ break it to you.”

 

“I was at war, Donny, everyone was at war, she used to be right looker and we both hated the Nazis - “

 

“I ain’t goin’ back in there, you two can go and stare at the racist old hag if you want.”

 

Steve slips through the door again, this time alone, thank God.

 

He is a thing of beauty, of course – the perfect proportions, brilliant blue eyes, blonde and fair as a porcelain doll ought to be. To tell you the truth, the Germans weren’t the only ones concerned with racial issues, and rightly so. We would have never selected a coloured man for the serum, never. It simply would have gone against the war effort.

 

Steve is the perfect American, physically, has been since the moment he emerged from his transformation. God, he is a thing of beauty, truly.

 

“Peggy, I’m… I’m not doin’ so well, to tell you the truth. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been, well, they’ve been keeping a close eye on me, you understand. Too close.”

 

What is he speaking of?

 

“I’m sure they are only concerned with your well being, darling.”

 

“Peggy, I wanna go. Nothing holds me in this world, _nothin’_. I wake up every morning and it’s like I’m trapped in this strange dream. I don’t belong here. But S.H.I.E.L.D., they won’t let me go.”

 

Silly child! Of couse S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t just let you die. I would’ve never allowed him death, he is too valuable by far. It would break my heart, to see him go after such an effort to retrieve him.

 

“Steve, you’ve your duty. You agreed to it when you agreed to Erskine’s serum. Have you forgotten? Have you, now?”

 

He remains silent, good for him.

 

“Terror is on the rise, Steve, it is your duty to protect the free world, to stand tall as a figure of your country. America and Britain have fought in a great many wars while you were away. All in the name of freedom and - ”

 

“AND FOR FOSSIL FUELS!”

 

For God’s sake! This fellow needs to go! Right this instance. Why ever would I live in this godforsaken country and not at least enjoy its lax weapon regulations? Where is that thing, now? There, there, now you can shut your mouth, Mr. Lerner, or whatever that was.

 

“Peggy, put down the gun, I swear to God! Peggy!”

 

“Mrs. Carter, please, we’ll have to end visitation hours - “

 

They’re all shouting and screaming, poor souls, I haven’t had this much fun in a decade or so. Then she comes out of nowhere and plucks the gun from my hands, the Black Widow. I’ll let go willingly, for now. Imbeciles. If only I weren’t so _bloody old_.

 

*

 

A great deal of time passes before Steve comes back to see me again.

 

He’s alone and carrying a bouquet of yellow roses, this time. I see he’s learned. Sharon phoned me a few times and told me all about his proclivities, as she’s the agent monitoring him. Wonderful girl, my Sharon.

 

I know the Black Widow is waiting outside again. At least he left his ratty communist friend at home, ah yes. Feeding the homeless, adopting them, even. Steve has always had a gentle heart, too kind, too kind by far.

 

Seargant Barnes has always been the one to do the dirty work, if I do recall my personal histories correctly.

 

Sharon told me all about the women he had lined up to quell his manly urges – some things never do change. He’d been elated at first, beautiful Steve, when the USO girls fell over themselves to suck his cock. Every nurse, every lady from auxiliary he came across, he’s charmed out of their sensible underwear.

 

I held myself together, of course. I was to marry him once the war was over, I was so sure.

 

Oh, Edwin, how times change.

 

“How are you doing today, Peggy?”

 

“I’m awfully bored, love. My mind is somewhat frayed but I can still string together a complex sentence, you musn’t treat me like I’m demented.”

 

He’s quiet for a few moments, then he starts crying.

 

“Shush, now, don’t be absurd, love, why ever are you so unhappy? I’ve been told that you enjoy every comfort. And your missions have been going rather well, haven’t they?”

 

“I’m losing my mind, Pegs. I know we had somethin’ back in the day, I know, but everyone’s a stranger. Even you are. And Bucky...” He’s sobbing now, poor soul.

 

“The good seargant wouldn’t like it if he saw you like this, I’m sure.”

 

Of course I’m a stranger to him. It smarts to hear, but it is nothing but the truth. We never had a normal life together, with time to sit down and have tea, chat about the Soviet Union, chat about curtains, chat about the superiority of cheddar cheese. I had that with Edwin, of course. I regret nothing that has to do with Edwin.

 

“Steve, darling, you must trust S.H.I.E.L.D. and its people. It is an institution I built from the ground up, after you were presumed dead. It is, if I may say so, the greatest of my achievements.”

 

Steve says nothing. He’s stopped reacting to me altogether, with his gaze fixed to a corner of this dreadful, tiresome room of mine.

 

I do terribly hate to feel such frustration.

 

If only had his youth, _oh_ the things I’d do. I’d get up from this lonesome chamber, I’d wash away the smell of antiseptic and dab on some perfume. I’d make love and smoke cigarettes. God, they never let me have cigarettes anymore.

 

Edwin, tell me love, why ever is he so still?

 

Edwin, I do miss you – sometimes I wake up and I think it’s 1956, and we’ve just gotten married. You took all the weight off my shoulders, love, you do even now, when I’m all but bed-ridden. Tell me, Edwin, have I gone off the deep end? How can he still be the same, Steven Grant Rogers, how can it be?

 

Such beauty, such youth.

 

Have I dreamed our lives, Edwin? Am I to wake up and find myself back in the war? Oh, but then I’d rather sleep on, and remain so for good.

 

Edwin?


	3. Various Opioids and the Sanity of Fools

_THE LOVE OF CHRIST_

 

His first reaction had been to smile.

 

Bucky’s face, smudged and strange, was a welcome sight admist the jumbled, confused haze of violence clouding everything. Besides, Steve hadn’t seen him in quite some time: his phantom had disappeared along with the S.H.I.E.L.D. issue medication and bi-weekly mandatory therapy with Susan.

In the back of his mind, a place crammed and filthy with untouched, fleeting memories, Steve kept reminding himself to remember Bucky’s face. The second the muzzle-like mask came off the Winter Soldier during combat, Steve had merely thanked his mind for supplying the image. He had gone without it for a precarious amount of time.

 

It was afterwards, when hours and hours had passed, that the moment replayed with perfect clarity in his serum enhanced mind, and realization dawned upon him with a chokehold. Spiked tendrils of emotion that pierced through his very bones and closed off his airways with the most grievous and bloody of joys.

 

Looking back, Steve was certain it was the most pain he had ever felt in his unnaturally stretched-out life. The long years of perpetual sickness and the many times he had gotten himself shot notwithstanding.

  


*

  


Waking up in a hospital with a plethora of new injuries and his equally new friend Sam asleep in the stiff visitor’s chair, he started praying in earnest for the first time since being brought back to the 21st century.

 

He did it privately, in between his sixteen burger recovery meals and the painful hobbles to the bathroom for a leak. Sometimes he would sit on the toilet with his fries soaked in mayonnaise and speak to God. He would remember all the Irish prayers his Mam ever said, and repeat them, copying her accent and her words when he lost his own.

 

Saint Patrick spoke to him in the half-dreams his mind managed to produce with exhaustion: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Steven, _mo chuisle_ , Steven Grant Rogers,“ he whispered, terrible and bright, watching over his children across the ocean with painted eyes on church walls, one thousand five hundred years later.

 

He thanked God for granting him life, for bringing him back, for letting him have Bucky once again. He understood now, he thought desperately, while licking the grease and salt of Sam’s fried chicken from his fingers. He understood why he was here, in this shiny, colourful, utterly unforgiving place.

 

He apologized for attempting suicide, crossing himself over and over in between Filet-O-Fish burgers and cheese puffs and candy bars and cups of Jello.

 

He would find Bucky. He screamed to God that he would, in his mind. Though some times it ended up being out loud.

 

The nurses stopped checking in after the first few nights.

  


*

  


Bucky had been a staunch non-believer.

 

He had taken Marx by his word, refusing the metaphorical opium that numbed the masses from their misery. They had argued about it incessantly, after Steve’s Mam had passed and they had moved into their rickety little shoebox of an apartment. Like clockwork, every Sunday morning, when Steve rose early to attend mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Bucky would crack open an eye and snort his disdain into a pillow.

 

“Oh, you not Irish anymore, pal?” Steve would start.

 

“Don’t Jesus tell us that _all men_ are his children? What’s Irish got to do with it, now?” Bucky would then roll out of bed and glare at him, letting the few Irish words he had saved for this very occasion tumble out, rebellious in the small safety of their own four walls. It had irked Steve every single time – though neither of them truly spoke it, Bucky knew just a tad more Gaelic.

 

To them, most of the words were mere collections of sounds, with no real grasp of the structures and meanings, just the words their mothers had let drop some time or other. They both treasured them, anyways.

 

“Ah, go pray some for the toiling workers, see how much good it’ll do them!”

 

“I will, I will, buddy. I’ll tell yer Ma you sent greetings, tell her you think union membership and _our culture_ are mutually exclusive.”

 

“ _Téigh trasna ort féin_!“ Bucky would say, flipping him the bird, and Steve would repeat it back to him, like a prayer.

  


*

  


He changed his mind once Romanoff handed him the Kiev file.

 

He took an internal second to thank her, and feel a bizarre rush of gratitude towards their strange professional relationship. She had been his greates ally in regards to disassembling Hydra, and by extension S.H.I.E.L.D., yet the air between them was still luke-warm at best. It suited him just fine.

 

Because once that second had passed, he directed all his enegry towards the trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, revoking every prayer he had ever said, silently or out-loud. They deserved none of his devotion, they deserved nothing but ice and pain and rage.

 

He read the file, tacked with post-its and Romanoff’s spindly, fine handwritten translations, a grand total of twenty-six times. After he was finished, he flipped it close and resolved to learning Russian as fast as possible. He had to be capable of reading the original version. He would not let translations spare him of anything they had done to Bucky.

 

It was only a fraction of his penance to come.

  


*

  


He phoned the senior citizen’s home and spoke to Peggy about the weather and the chocolates her children had sent her from England. She asked him to visit three times in a row, before drifting off and confusing him with her late husband Edwin.

 

It felt strange, the sense of obligation that gnawed at him whenever he pictured her brown eyes, lined with age, drooping eye bags and tiny broken veins, a sickly blue-green against her pallid complexion. She had been a near deity to him, the picture of beauty and competence, the very type of woman little Stevie Rogers would have never truly encountered without the serum. A _classy_ lady.

 

Stevie Rogers, who hadn’t had two pennies to rub together, with no education to speak of. Stevie Rogers, who, in all honesty, had only lived through the winters because of his stubborn best friend. Stevie Rogers, who, for all his political beliefs, still felt a deep-seated shame at his general _lack_.

 

He could not reconcile the dame he had known and admired with the one that lay abed in the expensively understated nursing home just outside Washington.

 

In comparison, the phonecall with Donny was as simple as eating. Donny knew that he was batshit crazy, that he saw phantoms and spectres and held one-sided conversations with thin air. He was aloof enough to ignore the fine details that declared Steve insane, and spoke to him just enough to ground him in reality until S.H.I.E.L.D. sent him on his next mission.

 

Their shared anti-capitalist views also helped.

 

“You gotta hold on tight, Cap, I’ll be flat sitting and having at your weed until you’re back. Listen, you ever need anything, jus’ give old Donny a call, yeah? Anything, really, ‘sides crack, that’s a no-go, obviously.”

 

After that was done, he bought a shabby cream-colored Sedan, an English-Russian dictionary, as well as a children’s book, suggested age 2-5, with fourty-seven traditional Russian folk tales. Lastly, he bought a few dozen family-sized value packs of barbecue flavoured chips.

 

Everything lay in shambles. Steve had never felt more at peace.

  


*

  


The first year he spent alone in his apartment had been a strange mixture between long, thirty-six hour sleeping sessions and bruised, vibrating days with no sleep at all.

 

At times, he hadn’t been completely able to discern whether he _had_ slept. It was not his memory that was lacking, quite the contrary. The serum granted him heightened senses that translated into his dreams, which were almost always in some form parallels to his memories. Did he dream? Or had he been awake from dusk til dawn, sitting with his eyes closed, recollecting all the flashes and snaps that had been his life?

 

He still went running at six o’clock sharp, no matter the state of his mind – his body always cooperated. It regenerated, ate and took deep gulps of breath even as his thoughts cluttered and decayed with raging solitude.

 

Once he moved Donny into the spare bedroom, he started to gauge the level of his own abnormal behaviour on his friend’s reaction. But Donny had been an outcast of society for long enough to glaze over it – he had seen people on drugs, he had seen people shamed, spit upon and chased away. He had seen people that might as well have been dead. To him, Steve and his confused banter was nothing new.

 

Sam, however. Sam Wilson was a well-adjusted individual, warm and comforting, serious and calm. His reactions told Steve exactly what he already knew: He had gone quite mad in the midst of this shiny new century.

  


*

  


Their first stop took them just outside Philadelphia.

 

Camden, New Jersey overlooked the Delaware River – it was choked with run-down buildings and the stench of poverty. The famous landmarks included a state prison and a trash-to-steam plant that polluted the water. Steve took an instant liking to it, while Sam managed to blend in seamlessly despite vocally expressing his discomfort.

 

The former S.H.I.E.L.D. facility sat in an inconspicuos office building that went below the ground for several stories. It had been shut down for an undetermined period of time, though the data Steve had gathered indicated some form of activity in the past weeks since the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.

 

There, they found the chair and the cryo chamber.

 

They also found three scientists, marked by their blindingly white lab coats, all of them dead for several days. They were laid down in a row, as if in a burial rite, with their arms crossed before their chests like mummies. Their eyes and mouths had been closed post mortem.

 

It was until much later, when they were back in their Sedan, that Steve noticed the moisture on his cheeks. Sam was quiet, looking down on the paper map of the East Coast Steve had insisted on buying, but his eyes were sharp and serious.

 

“You done laughing, son?”

 

Steve nodded, and opened a bag of his barbecue chips. Something pleasurable and hot blossomed in his chest, and he smiled while picturing the corners of Bucky’s eyes crinkling.

  
  


 

 

  


 

 

 

 

 

_DREAMS OF MALCOM X_

 

Son, sit your ass down, don’t be fidgeting around.

 

When the police be comin’ up to you, don’t you dare go runnin’. Be very still, be very still and if they aks you a question, you better answer respectfully. Keep your head down. I see you sassin’ anyone, Im’a whoop your ass six ways to Sunday.

 

Stop, stop fidgetin’, Samuel, stop. You want me dead? You want your momma dead? I be worryin’ about you so much, son.

  


*

  


“My momma promised she’d kill me if I ever get arrested.” Sam told Captain America while chained in the prisoner’s transport.

 

He didn’t answer, only stared ahead with his eyes fixed on a point in the middling distance. He had chewed his lower lip open again, a pink wound that stopped bleeding within seconds and reopened under the bite of his front teeth.

 

“I’m a first-time-offender, think that makes a difference, huh?”

 

Agent Romanoff fixed him with a dead stare, dyed red hair falling to frame her face. _She pretty_ , Sam thought to himself, _but she cold as a fish_.

 

Then one of the guards whipped her protective helmet off and drilled a goddamn escape hole into the thick metal of the vehicle.

  


*

  


To be very precise, Sam Wilson saw his first action in the summer of 1991.

 

He had been a buck-toothed thirteen year old average kid with a whiny voice, and his cousins, Doug Jr. and Jorell the tall, had made sure to drive the point of his bland averageness home all summer long. They hung out with him anyway, on that fateful, bright evening. Dicking around on the corner of 155th, fighting over a snickers bar, Sam Wilson got a loaded gun pointed to his head for the first time.

 

As the grown man that he was now, he had been in plenty of combatant situations. Yet it never left him, that dreaded calm knowledge of certain death his thirteen year old self had possessed.

 

He was a black boy. He had been a scrawny one, for sure, but he had known from the earliest age that his skin was simultaneously a canvas of mapped-out history, riddled with hypothetical bullet holes yet to come.

 

He didn’t remember much about the shouting and the tazers and the police sirens, but Lord, did he remember his momma running down the stairs towards him, just as he rounded the block, face ashen and wet with tear tracks.

 

She smacked him so hard he had ended up on the pavement all over again, then dragged him to their crammed little apartment and told him to sit still, to stop it with the fidgeting!

 

“You want me dead, Samuel Wilson? You want your momma dead?”

 

What he remembered most clearly was the way she cradled his face and told him to keep his head down, to remain respectful. Even as he resented her in that very moment, Sam had known it was the curdled, sour fear speaking, it was the same helplessness that had flashed through him.

 

He eventually learned to keep his head down, even as he grew taller and gained muscles from jogging around the block every other day and playing ball with his friends.

 

Joining the military made him feel better about a lot of things. Other things it worsened.

  


*

  


Following Captain American on a wild goose chase all across North America and Europe was an adequate excuse to not visit New York. Truth be told, he would much rather face down the Hydra assasin with his metal arm than go back to the block where he’d lived for almost twenty years.

 

It was also a decent excuse to remain absent from his job at the V.A..

 

In a way, meeting Steve was a strange turning point in his washed out D.C. life. Sam knew himself well enough to see through his own bullshit – he did not follow Steve Rogers out of patriotic inspiration, or lust for adventure. He got along fine with him, but in a way that eerily reminded him of his relationship with veterans he counselled.

 

Sam followed the crazed, grieving American icon for his own selfish reasons: namely, to avoid thinking about anything at all.

  


*

 

He realized early on that Captain America had problems the size of the Empire State building. Yet their interaction had been so laden with explosions, plotting, hand-to-hand combat and shield-throwing that he did not realize just how _serious_ these problems were. On their first evening alone, holed up in a motel in Maryland, he got a good glimpse of the manic shine in Steve’s eyes.

 

They had watched news recaps of the Triskelion on a crappy, early flatscreen model and ate noodles from Chinese takeout boxes. Afterwards, Steve had sat upright, eyes trained on the furthest point in the room, and refused sleep with a polite smile.

 

If anyone asked Sam of his professional opinion, he would have told them off the bat that Steve Rogers had a fairly unprecedented case of severe depression, PTSD and some form of dissociative disorder. He also smoked an alarming amount of pot, which could arguably have therapeutic qualities.

 

But his professional opinion meant shit all. Half the time, he was simply happy they were eating and sleeping and somehow alive.

  


*

  


While laying low in the outskirts of Bucharest, in a safehouse procured through some relatively dodgy connection, he finally allowed himself to think out loud in a whisper: _damn, son, he having fun or what_?

 

They had found a freshly bombed out Hydra facility three days ago, the first one they had managed to track in Europe. Steve had broke out into an obscenely large grin. “BUCKY! BUCKY YOU SONUVABITCH!”, he had screamed amongst the smoking, sizzling ruins, head thrown back with a delighted laugh. “BUCKY! YOU PUNK!”

 

The happiness had simmered just under his skin ever since, a vibrating force that had lit his cornflower blue eyes up and made him hum under his breath.

 

Belatedly, reclining on a creaky Romanian bed, Sam realized that he was in over his head. It did not matter much, though – he still wasn’t returning to New York. With this extended period of absence, the V.A. surely had already fired and replaced him, so there was no use hurrying back to D.C., either. It was a strange, new thought: goody-two-shoes Sam Wilson losing his job, the only one from his group of friends to make it out of Harlem, the only one to go to college.

 

His thoughts drifted to Riley for a nanosecond before he pushed the matter back with brute force, focussing on Steve instead, who was doodling in a notebook, his posture strangely stiff, as it often was.

 

“Grand old day, ain’t it?” He said, once he noticed Sam looking. Outside, the sky was darkening in a dull, sleet grey. The decrepit beigbourhood they had settled in did nothing to make the scenery any more worthwhile.

 

“It sure is, man.”

  


*

  


Jorell the Tall kept his nickname and title, even though he ended up being the smallest of the crew. He got into trouble soon enough, quick and sharp as he was, running errands for some local small-time dealers, before graduating to bigger fish. Meanwhile, Sam graduated high school and learned to speak respectable English.

 

He also learned some Spanish, though that was infinitely easier than keeping the Harlem drawl from his voice.

 

He took the posters of James Baldwin and Malcom X off his walls before he moved out. Big L, with the bold letters reading “HARLEM’S FINEST”, he left hanging, because nostalgia had threatened to drown him and Jorell had just been given 9 years for distribution.

 

In ‘99, Big L was shot in the face and chest nine times at 45 West 139th Street. Sam merely marveled at the repetition of the number, what with Jorell the Tall and Big L and the years and the shots. He had been in his senior year at college, half-way across the country, safe from any news that might reach him and grind him to dust with grief.

 

He kept his head down and put his hands up whenever he was pulled over or controlled. He answered questions respectfully and spoke in the light, unthreatening tone of a news broadcaster, no hint of Harlem in his voice. No hint of his people, whom he loved, no hint of his momma, who was his all and everything.

 

In his head, he replayed a section of an audio recording of Malcom X, voracious and alive: “You don't shoot one of us and then shake our hands and think we'd forget it. No, we never forget, we'll never forget! Someone has to pay. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay.“

 

He thought of that particular passage often, and sometimes his daydreams brought him back to the Harlem of Malcom’s time, where he was one of the people clapping and shouting with fury, soaking in the all-consuming anger of his voice.

 

Somewhere, somehow, someone.

  


*

  


Moscow was a buzzing hive, grimy with dirt at some places and polished to a high sheen at others.

 

Sam felt the gazes of pedestrians and metro passangers tack to his face like glue. It was by now a familiar feeling, one that he hadn’t truly known in the States. There weren’t many black people around in Russia. That was that.

 

Agent Romanoff gave them access to her own safehouse, a gauzy, pretentious flat near Tverskaya in the very centre of the city. There was no touch of anything personal, the grandeur of the velvet curtains perfectly matched with the deep red of the plush carpets. The kitchen was stocked with pain medicine, ammunition and sets of sharp knives.

 

Steve went out for a few hours at dusk and returned with a baggie of hashish, a solid little brown block that he went over with his lighter a couple times before crumbling. They smoked a few joints while pouring over the new files they had collected in the first three facilities.

 

It was mostly mundane, bureaucratic bullshit. In between, with the help of internet translators and Steve’s unbridled zeal, they uncovered a few nuggest of information that were almost golden.

 

“Where did you get the hash from, anyways?”

 

Steve had his eyes half-lidded behind a waft of curling smoke. He didn’t react at first, finishing his joint before turning his stare on Sam: “I walked by a park and hung around for a bit – eventually a guy sold me some.”

 

“Ain’t it nice to be white,” Sam said before he could still his mouth. He wouldn’t have dared to buy drugs in Moscow.

 

Steve sat still for a moment, brows drawn. Then he nodded, making an aborted gesture, as if to touch Sam’s knee.

 

“I haven’t thought about that for a while. Not being white, but, well, what I am and what society is, what it makes of people...” He started rolling up his next smoke, hands steady and practiced. “I used to talk about it all the time, with Bucky, and with my Mam, with all sorts of people.”

 

“Yeah,” Sam said, and before he could help himself, he thought about the long nights where Riley would sit up with a cigarette and they would talk and talk and talk. It was a painful blow to his clouded head, and he quickly closed his eyes.

 

Riley was a wound, seemingly healed, festering under his skin. He was the answer to all his questions, the quirk of mirth that lit up the weeks and months of depression. He was the weighed presence on his shoulders and the voice that spoke to him while he soared the skies.

 

Sam stretched out his hand and took the joint from Steve’s lax fingers. He inhaled and breathed out.

  
  
  


 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

_USOGORSK_

 

Natalia dyed her hair strawberry blonde.

 

She then got on a nine hour flight to Moscow, Domodedovo. Her hands had been full, if not tied, the past two months, with a constant back and forth between the remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Barton. It had almost been a strange sense of pleasure that coiled low in her abdomen, what with the destruction and the chaos, the angered men, useless in their pricey suits.

 

Rogers had been on her mind, on and off, in professional capacities and private ones. The Winter Soldier, the elusive specter he chased, was of high interest to her. The blanks in her head, the blankness of her body, the blank walls of her twelve apartments and safehouses – they all pointed towards the covert operative Hydra had, quite literally, unleashed.

 

It was only logical that she should be present, when his missing memories were so closely entwined with her own blanks.

 

Rogers, of course, had been almost maniacally elated. The smooth shell that made up his exterior had been cracking for some time now: Donald G. Lerner, the former homeless man who dealt him marijuana, had been a first sign. Agents had reported him speaking to hapless strangers, asking them to accompany him to Brooklyn. His sexual activities had been noted as lacking. The assigned psychiatrist had started mentioning hallucinations and lapses in awareness.

 

Seeing James Buchanan Barnes’ face had been the last straw, perhaps.

  


*

  


Natalia tracked them with no further difficulty.

 

Rogers and Samuel Wilson had not been aiming to remain inconspicuous as they made their way further east. She stuck to public transport, giving herself a slight Ukrainian lilt and a stutter to go along with it. Watching the flat scenery go by stirred nothing inside her, no grand emotions she held for the supposed motherland. Only vague recollections of past missions, or geographical facts.

 

Their trail took her east, but also north. She caught up with them in Usogorsk, population count 5,343.

 

The settlement was founded in the 1960s, for no more than a trade agreement with Bulgaria, specifically regarding timber harvest. The bleak, rectangled soviet era architecture did not leave very much to the imagination. The thick forest surrounding the town, with its spruces, pines and larches, was much less transparent.

 

She took up a room at the slightly larger of the two inns, where spindly _babushka_ Anastasiya lived and cooked on the ground floor, in a house that hadn’t been refurbished since the 1970s. There were no televisions, only a radio in the communal kitchen. The dinner she served was a solid stew with root vegetables and red meat that sat heavily in Natalia’s stomach.

 

Rogers and Wilson had stirred up the gossip mill around town. Two Americans, with one black as coal, the _babushka_ told her, eyes twinkling, though milky with age. “And now you, lady, we haven’t seen this much from outside Russia in years!”

 

“It is very beautiful here, I want to look around before carrying on with my tedious journey.” She told the _babushka_ , smiling the worn smile of weary travelers.

 

“Ah, yes, I would not go too far, the forest is a dangerous place for an urban lady like yourself.” Anastasiya laughed, slopping more stew onto her plate.

  


*

  


She met up with the two of them by midnight.

 

None of them spoke, though Rogers looked jittery enough to break out into a run. It was maybe the closest they had come to the Winter Soldier yet. Natalia led the three of them onwards, past closed shops and drawn curtains, until they reached the outskirts of the settlement, where the air turned crisp and cold with the rustling canopy.

 

The Red Room facility was, as often, mainly underground. The entrance led through a concrete shed, crawling with vine and concealed between the dense undergrowth and the tall stretch of trees decades old, older than Rogers.

 

“Be aware of the people – at least some of them had to be cooperating for this plant to remain fully functional over the years.” Her voice sounded strangely loud in the deadened darkness. Her eyes kept adjusting, catching sight of the light, and blinking shut.

 

“That’s very reassuring to hear,” Wilson grumbled under his breath, but he stepped into formation with a soldier’s routine when Rogers headed towards the iron-hinged door of the shed without pause.

 

She forced herself to focus, to catalogue their movements not with her eyesight but by sounds and scent. Roger’s gait was sure and poised, his muscles tight with anxiety and hope. Wilson breathed louder than both of them, audibly distressed with their nighttime surroundings. He had only ever lived in cities, as far as Natalia remembered.

 

A sudden whiff of gun oil and stale sweat gave her pause.

 

Rogers, attuned to their partnership in missions, immediately stopped moving, signalling Wilson to halt with a raised fist.

 

Then a gunshot rang through the dead of the night, the sudden volume so disorienting that Natalia had to brace herself in a crouch. Rogers and Wilson had both dropped down to their stomachs, breathing frantically. Another shot rang out, a hunting rifle, she guessed. It came from the western path, the very trail they had taken into the forest.

 

Then, with a flash of warmth beside her, the Winter Soldier appeared.

 

He was kneeling, soundless and still as a beast prowling towards its prey, glinting eyes the only part immediately visible. He was armed, guns held at the ready, and he was facing towards the source of the shooting.

 

“Bucky, God help me - ” Rogers sounded choked, his voice rough and cracking. Wilson was smart enough to muffle his words with a palm, and silence restored itself, save for the soft rustle of young leaves. A few minutes passed, then the Winter Soldier stood with a graceful upwards movement and headed towards the shed with a few decisive strides.

 

The door unlatched, and after a moment of indicision, Natalia moved to follow him, fingers resting on the triggers of her semi-automatics. Rogers did not experience her hesitation – he lunged towards the door like a stung horse, limbs suddenly uncoordinated.

  


*

  


Inside the windowless structure, a small flashlight flared into her face, blinding her for a second or two.

 

The Winter Soldier had uncovered his face, though his lank, shoulder-length hair sufficed to conceal any expression he might have had. He was partially wearing the heavy, black gear that Hydra had dressed him in, though his metal arm was now covered by a dark hoodie that looked suspiciously stained.

 

The only thing worth noticing in the shed was a closed trap door with no handle.

 

Rogers, who had to almost double over in order to enter, remained crouched, though his eyes drank in the Soldier’s features with a feverish greed. “Bucky, God help me, Jesus, Maria and Joseph...”

 

Then he sprang, inhumanly fast, a mere blur to normal eyes.

 

Simultaneously, Wilson, who had been standing by the door, yelped as it banged open. Natalia backed into a corner, both guns raised, as Rogers and the Soldier went down in a violent tumble. At the door, _babushka_ Anastasiya’s lined face appeared, eerily illuminated by the flicker of the glowing flashlight.

 

Natalia did not hesitate, but her shot only grazed the shoulder of a man who had pushed past the old woman. He was a neighbour, perhaps, his deep-set eyes and square jaw held a fleeting familiarity. He fell back, cursing, and clicks of gun safeties followed an order he barked.

 

There were more, she realized faintly. Next to her, Wilson had his gun pointed on the tangled limbs of Rogers and the Soldier, who were engaged in a wrestle none of them were equipped to break up.

 

“Down!” she yelled, and they both dropped for cover as a swarm of bullets found their way through the open door. Natalia raised her gun and fired, muscles straining from her position on the ground. She was certain that it had hit a vital organ, and fired again.

 

“Bucky, Bucky, please! Bucky!” Rogers wailed.

 

Natalia fired again, straining to hear whether the Winter Soldier was reacting in any way. She engaged the first man that came through the door with a kick to the sternum, movements falling into place with a smooth ease. Muscle memory presevered, even as she struggled to recall half the details of her life.

 

The crowded space came alive with frantic movements, yells and shots and curses. Somewhere in between the second and the third man she dropped, the Winter Soldier managed to shake off Rogers and raise his Marakovas long enough to place bullets into all the assailants within sight.

 

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Wilson said faintly from under a twitching body that was bleeding out fast.

  


*

  


Rogers and Wilson took watch.

 

Natalia fixed the former with a stern look and disregarded the latter. Her heartbeat was irregular, a sure sign of distress. The Soldier was standing over the open trap door, pale eyes guarded, the plates on his mechanical hand shifting with barely audible clicks. Under the bulk of his gear and the breadth of his shoulders, Natalia sensed a severely malnourished body, muscles that strained with every movement.

 

“This is the archive.”

 

It took her a few seconds to realize that he had spoken at all, let alone in Russian. His voice was gravelly, quiet, and he regarded her like an acquaintance of old. Her pulse quickened, almost painfully so.

 

Rogers’ pale face appeared at the door frame. His cheeks were streaked with dirt and tear tracks, smudged with blood, and he regarded the Soldier with an obvious mixture of awe and dread. This had to be fast, he was hardly going to remain stable for very much longer.

 

With a quick nod she crouched and descended into the darkness below.

  
  



	4. A Long Sleep, or: The Collective Guilt We Bear

_SIX TIMES_

 

Of course he remembers.

 

There should be nothing left of him, but here he is, with sweaty palms and a growling stomach and a mind that conjures the smell of boiled potatoes, steaming with butter, bacon strips and a hefty pinch of salt.

 

The trees, they sway in the wind, gnarled and old, reaching upwards, twisting left, twisting right, tangling together, and they speak to him, saying, _oh_ , look, it’s a man with no left hand! Look, now, look, his stumbling feet tread lightly on our roots, _how very lightly_. Look, look at the gray of his eyes, look at his face, a closed window, a closed door, a house with no entrance and no exit.

 

What is it like to wake up early, with the air surrounding you stinging cold, with the knowledge that you are the only warmth in the room? What is it like to breathe out in a fogging cloud, and forget the vacant, faceless dreams?

 

Of course her remembers – what else is there, besides his body that mends, and mends, and closes all the gaps, ignites sparks when the synapses align, when he leans back and opens himself to the phantom of anguish, to the terrible, terrible happiness that once was.

 

I am suffocating, he tells himself, I am a worm encased in hard concrete, wiggling and screaming, with no voice and no mouth, severed vocal cords and still I scream. Steve Rogers, a tiny, bedraggled blond child, a hulking man, a feverish corpse to-be. What is he, what has become of him, where is the air he breathed, what of the smiles and the sketches and the strange absences?

 

Ma! He yelled, Ma, forgive me, forgive me, let me confess, let me go with you on Sunday, and all the days to come! Oh, Christ, Christ, are you with me? I smelled burning flesh and I felt hungry. I saw death and death looked back, we stared at one another, on and on – Christ, grant me mercy, tell me how to stop! My sins, my sins, my sins –

 

The trees, they sway in the wind, smiling old smiles.

  


*

  


The sun was rising, a meek, pinkish bleed of color in the cold eastern sky.

 

A soldier, a shell, a grinning young boy took careful steps away from the well-trodden path that cut through the dense, shadowy green that made up the forest at dawn. Behind him, Natalia Alianovna Romanova glided through the undergrowth, parting branches with her sweeping arms, eyes darting, capturing. The man, the soldier, the creature knew her, knew the unnatural color of her peculiar eyes, the sheen of sweat on her brow.

 

She was an awful beauty, the creature could tell. A heap of bland elements that came together as the needs dictated, a familiar, pleasant taste that was quickly forgotten.

 

Behind her walked his dreams, walked his anger and his terror, with a bloodied nose and a startlingly blue eye that was swelling shut. _Oh Steve_ , Bucky Barnes thought, _oh Steve, why? Why?_ The asset, the sniffling little boy, the creature, they all turned and looked at him, at the pale, sunken man, at the inkling of life that had never left him, not truly, not ever truly.

 

There was another man, the falcon, the flying dot in the sky, a pair of weary eyes that never left his back. The soldier noticed his every movement, while Bucky Barnes, the adoring foolish youth, turned his eyes on Steve Rogers and clung to him like a drowning rat, a rat that had never learned to swim, scrabbling and whipping its naked, slimy tail in desperation, clinging on and on and –

 

Around them, the forest chirped and rustled. Bucky Barnes turned up one foreign corner of his mouth and stopped walking: “I left my bag somewhere around here, whaddaya say, folks? We follow the _Mezen_ to _Koslan_ and try for a bus or something there?”

It rushed out of him like a breath held too long, the words, like a loosened string of pearls, tumbled from his lips in a harsh clatter. The soldier, the asset, the creature halted and closed both eyes, fighting the vertigo.

 

The metal arm whirred and clicked, mechanical sounds that were jarring and hard-edged against the soft backdrop.

 

“Bucky.” Steve, stupid, hateful Steve, was walking towards him, eyes brimming, mouth an open gape. “You remember, tell me you remember, tell me, tell me, _please_ , Bucky. Tell me you’re here.” His voice had a strange lilt, a cadence, like he was saying a prayer for penance.

 

“Fucking punk, of course I remember, hardly had a choice, eh?”

 

He was overwhelmed. No, that was an understatement. Sweat was running down his back, settling in the stiff, filthy fabric of his undershirt. Bucky Barnes, the grinning little Irish boy, the soldier, the broken heap of bones, the creature with no name and no songs to sing.

 

Steve, infuriating, serious Steve, was walking towards him, never stopping the long strides of his long legs, crying ugly tears with his face twisted and snot sliding down his chin, his eye tinged purple, mixed with an inflamed red. How beautiful colors are, Bucky Barnes thought, how beautiful Steve is, awful, stubborn Steve.

 

He gripped Bucky by the shoulders and crushed him between his arms. It hurt, three ribs were still cracked and taking their time healing, but it was a good hurt. “Why the hell are you so surprised, huh? Think they could fry my brain and keep me docile forever? I will kill them all, line them up and smile at their fucking corpses. What were they thinking when they made me? _Polnye idioty_!”

 

Steve’s moist cheek was pressed against the grimy crook of his neck, bright, smiling, gap-toothed little Stevie. His body felt solid beneath Bucky Barnes’ hands, the asset’s delicate bionic fingers, he felt warm and he smelled sour and metallic. Then he caved, the sky and the grassy ground both rushing up to meet his flailing limbs, the trees toppling over, and Steve, his Steve, toppled with them.

 

The soldier, the weary dock-worker, the boy who knew all the verses to the solidarity tune, the asset, the creature, the clawing, screaming creature, the worm trapped beneath the sole of a grinding boot, the man, Bucky Barnes –

  


*

  


The first piece of Bucky Barnes that returned was, in all honestly.

 

His cock.

 

Dragging himself from the riverbanks of the Potomac, he had felt like a puppet with cut strings, dazed and entirely lacking orientation, even as his feet carried him onwards, ducking when necessary, concealing his face when needed. He had felt no remorse at leaving the target, Captain America, behind, only a lasting pull, a whispering voice that told him to _go, run, leave, lay low!_

 

He had managed to reach an alley, stacked with bins and reeking with refuse, where he crawled to sit with his back against the wall, eyes surveying the surroundings. He remained in the position for the next five hours, resting, attempting to still the violent twitches in his right hand, flesh, bone and tendons.

 

He started by touching his face, trailing down the bridge of his nose with a stiff finger. Then his mouth, the outlines of the cracked, peeling lips. His tongue, where the mouth guard usually sat, a strange, wet muscle, both soft and hard to the touch. The trembling hand made its way down his torso, the movements practiced, checking for injuries. He patted along his thighs, draped in soaking black fabric, down to his ankles, where the heavy combat boots started.

 

Then, in an imprecise upward-movement, he brushed his crotch.

 

It was so unexpected, amongst the many things that were unraveling before him, that he choked and bit the inside of his left cheek.

 

“ _What_ ,” he whispered, and then inhaled, rotting garbage and piss, the cold, clammy scent of the Potomac river. The arm whirred and clicked, immobile, and he breathed out in a rush while prying his pants open, hands closing around his cock, with wonder and nothing else but muscle memory. It felt strange, it felt right, it felt fucking amazing.

 

He came six times. _Six_.

  


*

  


“Bucky? Hey, Buck – “

 

A sweltering Brooklyn morning, the city stench barely kept at bay, the sun out in the sky with not one cloud as company. The sheets are scratchy and tacky from all the sweating, and Steve’s in the kitchen, rumbling and complaining, clanking with pots and pans and what-have-yous.

 

He has work in an hour or so, his shift will start and if he’s tardy there will be sufficient young men loitering about, waiting for an opportunity, a dollar fifty for a day’s labor. Haulin’ and carryin’ and complainin’.

 

He might buy something nice today, why not, the sun’s out and they could step out in the evening, don’t matter if he’s flush or not.

 

“Bucky, you gotta wake up!”

 

Steve’s poking his head into their bedroom, brows drawn in his sharp little face. He is chewing something, hands rolling a wad of newspaper into a makeshift club. He laughs at the thought, ickle Stevie Rogers going to town on his ass for sleeping in.

 

When James Buchanan Barnes opens his eyes, three disbelieving faces stare back at him, way too close. Beyond them, the sky is a wink of pale blue behind the straight stretch of trees and the sparse forest canopy. Everything aches, his stomach is an awful, grumbling void.

 

Natalia has brushed her hair back from her pale face, eyes alert. The pleasure of seeing her again, whole and beautiful and _grown_ , sends an electrical jolt up his spine. He lapses, back and forth, all over the place, like an old man grasping for strings to guide him. But Natalia, Natalia, how could he forget his Natalia?

 

“Look at you,” he tells her, and isn’t it miraculous, that he loves this language, loves the hard staccato and the rolling vowels. That he loves this woman, despite the blankness that engulfed them, for years and years. “Look at you, Natashenka.”

 

She keeps staring at him, and says nothing.

 

The two other men, they stare as well. The black man, his eyes are hooded and weary, his brows drawn. Next to him, the large, bulking blond has his eyes widened, though one is swelling shut with a bruise. He has Steve’s crooked nose, and that tweaks something inside him, something that chokes him where he’s lying down.

 

Steve’s gone.

 

Where to? Where to? So many fucking holes to patch, so many thoughts to chase, ghosts to haunt.

 

He sits up and the three of them back away, Natalia light on her feet, eyes darting to asses her new position, as he’d taught her. She is a vision, an unnatural scream in the sea of soft green tones.

 

Then he vomits, upends what little he has in his stomach, spitting bile and saliva.

 

“Lad, what is this great mess, ey? Have ya been drinkin’?”

 

His Ma is standing at the door, face placid with the familiar scenario. Becca pokes her head in briefly, and wrinkles her nose in disgust. Something is cooking in the kitchen, something always is, and it makes his insides rumble in revolt. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he shouldn’t have gone drinking. Too much whiskey, laughing, another pub, and another.

 

But Marjorie O’Flaherty had smiled, wide-eyed and sweet, and it had been a buzzin’ feeling, with her pressed close to his side and the Bushmills swirling his thoughts.

 

“Bucky?”

 

He wipes his mouth with a sleeve, and looks up into a familiar face. Steve, how is this Steve? God, when did he get so big? The serum! The war! The fucking war, how could he forget? The Howlies, where is everyone? Morita, Dugan, Falsworth, Gabe Jones, Dernier, where have they all gone to?

 

How could he forget?

 

He makes to stand, and Steve comes forward, grabs him by the arm and hauls him up like he weighs nothing. They stumble a few paces together, until he can lean against the trunk of a mighty tree. Long hair falls before his face, the strands lank with sweat and bile.

 

Samuel Thomas Wilson, Codename: Falcon. He walks towards him, and his face is shuttered as he speaks: “What do you remember, soldier?”

 

He remembers –

 

Steve, angry, spitting blood, the creaking of a mattress, annoying and mundane, the coldness of nothing, just before his eyes open, the slick length of his cock, silky to the touch and hard, aching, the wide, beautiful planes of Siberia, the little half-smile of his Ma, the dull prayers on Sundays, yawning a lot, the bitter alpine frost, his uniform collar turned up, the wind, the whoosh of falling, falling upwards or downwards, falling towards the sky and –

 

“ _Bucky_!” Steve screams, his voice audible even against the rat-tat-tat of the train, of the guns, the cracking air and the years passing by.

 

Of course he remembers.

  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_SORRY EYES_

 

Steve had five helpings of pierogi.

 

He downed almost the entire pot of purple Borscht soup, ate most of the bread and scooped the tin of tasteless sour cream empty. At the table, Sam had politely finished half his portion before laying down his fork while Romanoff continued picking at hers, eating in clean little bites.

 

Bucky was staunchly seated in the gauzy, golden living room of Romanoff’s Moscow safe house, passed out against stiff, wine-red cushions with his head tilted back and his mouth wide open. The disgusting long hair covered half his face, with a strand caught between his lips, fluttering whenever he breathed out in noisy half-snores. His skin looked pale and bruised, everything about him seemed unnaturally sharp and awkward.

 

Steve stared.

 

Romanoff broke out a bottle of vodka from her freezer and offered Sam a two liter plastic beer bottle when he refused politely. Steve accepted both, alternating between shots of clear vodka and gulps of cheap Ochakovo. It left him with a vague, warm feeling in his gut that passed within a few minutes.

 

Bucky’s limp form seemed to glare back at him.

 

His legs, one stretched, the other bended at the knee. His arms, the metal one whirring and twitching in his sleep, the flesh and bone hand lax and strangely graceful. He was covered in a layer of solid grime, the unwashed stench of him putrid even a room away. It was a familiar smell: hints of urine, sour and pungent, dust and dirt, odours of the streets. The ripe, sweaty scent of humans who were discarded, who had gone without care and hygiene for too long.

 

“I’d suggest you lay low,” Romanoff said in between her bites. She was perched on her chair with a knee drawn to her chest, two of her four guns placed on the table, right next to her plate. “All of you.”

 

Steve turned his gaze on her for a minute. She was unreadable as ever, but he knew that the encounter had shaken her. Bucky had called for her with endearments, with obvious awe in his eyes. They had both gone down to the Red Room archives and returned with a rucksack full of files, dusty and yellowing, some disintegrating and barely readable. There were things you could not find on the world wide web, after all.

 

The files sat in a corner of the kitchen, a haphazard pile that Romanoff had scanned, page by page, before sitting for the Russian takeout dinner.

 

“Where, though?” Sam asked, mouth an unhappy downturn. He had been quiet and somber since Bucky’s bout of unconsciousness and the following lapses in memory and coherence. “Don’t feel right to be imposing on you here.”

 

“You can impose on me elsewhere. I’ll give you a location by tomorrow.”

 

She made to speak, but stopped. Steve whipped his head around so hard his spine seemed to crack with it. His heart beat out an irregular pattern, and for a moment he forgot to inhale. Bucky had stirred on the pretentious lounge chaise. His metal hand opened and closed, as if squeezing something invisible, and his head twitched to the left a couple times.

 

“He’s dreaming, man.” Sam said in a hushed half-whisper.

 

Steve stood, setting down his plastic beer, and took a few cautious steps. He could see the rapid movements beneath Bucky’s blueish eyelids, the way his brows were tense and drawn. A few more steps, a few more. A fan of eyelashes, cluttered with gunk and moisture. Bloodless lips, pulled to a straight line. There he lay, his best friend, a dreaming corpse revived.

 

Steve stared, and stared, and he knew that this man, disassembled to insanity, reeking of soil, was the best thing he’d ever laid his sorry eyes on.

  


*

  


There were two men that Steve had desperately longed to meet throughout his short-lived boyhood.

 

One was Joseph Rogers. The other was James Connolly.

 

Joseph was obvious: his Mam had been telling him about his death-by-mustard-gas-father since the very start of his conscious memory. She had a way of speaking about their ardent love affair, back in Galway, that made him sound like both the best man and the biggest oaf in all of Ireland. Joseph had been very insecure and sensitive, very sweet but also sullen and serious. He had hair a bright, sunny orange and very strange, squishy ears.

 

On photographs, the ears had looked perfectly normal, while the supposed vibrant red of his stylish coif had been reduced to a dull gray that matched the background.

 

“Wrote me the most beautiful letters, your da’, though I mostly pretended to dislike them. He wasn’t overly dashing, no, I’m quite glad you got your nose from my side, lad. He would write to _the Socialist_ with opinion pieces, you see, they published a few, John Smith Clarke sent him a letter of thanks in ‘13.”

 

Steve had seen the letters, and found them rather on the short side. By the time he was twelve, he had been convinced that they were the dullest love letters to ever be written. Joseph had signed each of them with a flourish, all reading “From our beauteous Dublin, yours, J. Rogers”.

 

He had also stared at the single elaborate portrait photograph of Joseph Rogers for hours on end, trying to find similarities that would manifest their blood relations. In the end, he conceded that his Mam had the rights of it: She might as well had popped him out all by herself. With the flaxen hair, the large nose and the knobbly knees, he was all her.

 

At the time he heard of James Connolly, Bucky had already solidly installed himself at his bony left side: Day in, day out, he would chew Steve’s one good ear off with the random witticisms of bored children and point out stray cats with pretty coloring. Naturally, Connolly became his hero first.

Steve fought him about it for a few years, claiming that he had been the one to start the worship, but deep down, he knew – Bucky Barnes had always been one step ahead of him, in all things large and small.

 

James Connolly had been Irish, just like they were. He had been born a poor wretch, eating potatoes and thin broth, breakfast, lunch and dinner – just like them. He was a revolutionary syndicalist, which was an honorable thing, as most of the folks around them were in some union or other. He was also sentenced to death by firing squad and carried to the prison courtyard on a stretcher in 1916, already injured with his role in the Easter Rising.

 

He was the best proletarian one could conceivably think of.

 

A milestone in their journey of discovering Connolly had been the booklet titled “Songs of Freedom” from Old man Barnes’ cluttered trunk. They had gone through the lyrics together, in complete awe of the poetry, reading the words out loud, mimicking the lilt and roll of their parents’ accent. Bucky had learned to sing some of them, pestering old, deaf Mister Fuchs, who had lived through Haymarket and knew all there was to know about the worker’s struggle.

 

“’Tis passing strange, for I declare

Such statements give me mirth,

For our demands most moderate are,

We only want the earth.“

 

Steve had delighted in the words, imagining himself walking towards a fine gentleman of import during his Sunday shopping, all fancy and dressed up, and demand not just a penny, but the entire damn earth. Later in life, he had appreciated the songs as a figurative outcry, a tune to cement his own growing rage.

 

One thing, however, remained abundantly clear: James Connolly was an infinitely better writer than Joseph Rogers.

  


*

  


Romanoff made her arrangements.

 

She left the apartment for two days, returning with forged passports and checked-in boarding cards heading towards Berlin-Tegel with a Russian budget airline that provided no leg space and floppy, dry sandwiches.

 

Sam became an Angolan businessman by the name Enano Braga, complete with a set of glasses. Steve once again shaved his head and put on a cap, posing as some Danish fellow named Ole Rasmussen, doing is post-doc in modern history at the Free University Berlin.

 

Bucky, well.

 

Bucky had slept through the days. He barely stirred when they moved him from the couch to the pretentious master bedroom, the whites of his eyes showing beneath half-closed eyelids. On day two Steve had attempted at taking off his shoes and weapons, which resulted in him sitting up, wild eyed with panic.

 

The fatigue claimed him soon enough though, and he passed out against Steve thigh, drooling and snoring, twitching, sometimes speaking half-sentences and unfinished words in Russian and English. Sam swore he had also heard some French thrown in there.

 

“The human body recuperates much, much faster during sleep, man. I think he was running on his last reserves out there. Can’t blame a brother for having to sleep it off.”

 

“He needs to be alert for the flight.” Romanoff had said. She had granted them another day of inaction before going to Bucky’s bedside and slapping him twice on each cheek, and hard. Steve had fumed, but it had worked. The Bucky that woke up was still dazed and unfocused, but he complied when Romanoff told him to shower and tie back his hair.

 

Mr. Braga, Ole Rasmussen and a certain Vadim Gusev on a tourist visa boarded the four hour flight to Germany.

 

Romanoff drove them to Sheremetyevo airport. She handed the laptop case stuffed with copied versions of the Red Room files to Ole. Enano Braga received a curt nod. Vadim, conscious of his surroundings but weary, got a long, hard look, laden with promise.

  


*

  


Maybe he was idealizing the past.

 

How could every Brooklyn afternoon have been so sunlit and golden? How could the James Buchanan Barnes of his memories smile so bright, so carefree, when in reality he had worked ten, eleven hours and gotten paid for a measly eight? The sky above them was always blue beyond imagining, or lit with stars. In a polluted city as theirs, a clear vision had been rare, to say the least.

 

Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, the tortured Sergeant, the man sleeping and refusing to wake. He was the single thread of proof that tied Steve back to a time before the serum, before the ice.

 

Without Bucky, he would become the thin air he used to hold conversations with. He would himself become a hallucination, a grotesque caricature that only smiled in the face of grief.

  
  
  
  
  


  


 

 

 

_SOMETHING TO LOOK AT_

 

Berlin was a clusterfuck of ungodly proportions.

 

That was the single thought Sam could hold on to while they accelerated along the Autobahn in a stylishly rosé pink, cramped-as-fuck VW Beetle. His chin was almost making contact with his knees in the backseat, the blurry countryside of Northern Germany speeding by at the corner of his eye.

 

Barnes let loose a colorful chain of swearwords when Steve swerved into the neighboring lane. His hold on the two Sig Sauers was reassuringly steady as he patiently pressed the button to scroll down a window.

 

Gunfire erupted, deafeningly loud but strangely muted by the whistling wind of speed. Behind them, the nondescript black car that had been tailing them since Potsdam lost its right rear-view mirror.

 

“I had ‘em on the ropes,” Steve promised in his general direction, fists white-knuckled on the shiny steering wheel while they changed lanes again with a violent lurch. Barnes scowled, hands busy handling ammunition with a casual precision that still set Sam’s skin to crawling.

 

“You’re a goddamn shit driver, Stevie.”

 

For a moment, the silence of the German highway settled in like a punch. Sam ducked his head and counted till three. Then the shouting started again, turned on full volume as Rogers and Barnes hurled abuse at one another with abandon. Outside, the damaged Hydra car gained a few meters on them.

 

A fucking clusterfuck.

  


*

  


But in all honesty: Berlin was a breath of fresh air.

 

Being a city of immigrants, of dark complexions and foreign tongues, it allowed him to drop the hyper-vigilance his blackness had made mandatory during their month-long foray in rural Russia. Romanoff had set them up with an former East German acquaintance of hers, now retired and living in a Kreuzberg flat in a half-gentrified neighborhood, surrounded by Turkish supermarkets, Kebab shops and hipster cafés.

 

There were three things that, in retrospective, Sam found distinctly remarkable.

 

Number-fucking-one: James Buchanan Barnes and the unpredictability that made up his person. He should have seen it coming, but after so many days with the man soundly asleep and reeking of piss, it had come as something akin to a surprise – Berlin woke up Barnes in a riot. It started with him chatting up a stewardess in slick Russian on their flight, went on with him cracking jokes with the German taxi driver and ended with him disappearing for three days straight just to waltz back high as a kite.

 

Or maybe that was really just the beginning.

 

The more Sam thought about it, the more he realized that he should have known to expect something drastic. And that brought him to number-fucking-two: Steven Grant Rogers and his giant mess of emotions that set them on this trip in the first place.

 

The dedication Rogers had set to protecting his friend was, frankly, a borderline case. Sam had been aware of that during their search – yet now, with the Winter Soldier ‘caught’, it had taken on new heights. At times, he was reminded of the stereotypical behavior of an over-protective parent. Other, more unfortunate times yielded the comparison of a maybe-abusive, definitely obsessive spouse.

 

And sweet baby Jesus, could they fight.

 

Barnes, despite his seventy years of brainwashing and torture, still had the figurative muscle memory of pushing all of Steve’s buttons. The first time they went at it, snarking and pushing each other around, Sam had almost pissed his pants. Then they did it again, going off over public transport. And again, this time over _social housing_ , of all things.

 

Sam remained in his observing, pacifying role, keeping his mouth shut. Three weeks into their stay in Berlin, something became clear: Barnes and Rogers were already on their way to the unhealthiest of all co-dependencies. Also, the world had somehow missed out on their staunch Marxism.

 

Which brought him to number-fucking-three: Dieter.

 

How they did not look straight through him, Sam still didn’t know. But Romanoff’s former GDR connection came off as something quite bizarre, maybe even charming, at first. Now, with the hostile cars giving chase, it became clear that Hydra could be very persuasive.

  


*

  


Romanoff’s Berlin contact had turned out to be a bearded little man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. His long, beak-like nose greeted them first, the tall wooden door to his flat barely cracked open an inch. After ten seconds of uncomfortable silence, he finally grinned, revealing smoke-stained yellowing teeth: “Herr Gusev, Herr Rasmussen – ah, and who is zis? Mister Braga, ja.”

 

The flat was dark and unbelievably cluttered: from floor to ceiling, books and paper files piled atop of one another, stacks of records, broken CD covers, boxes marked with serial numbers and German words.

Wedged in between were dusty leather recliners and heavy wooden tables piled with assortments of screw drivers, folded rags of cloth and faded magazine cut-outs. Sam counted three boxy, old televisions just walking through the living room. Curtains, brown and painfully 70s, kept most of the remaining daylight out.

 

His Momma wouldn’t have tolerated any of this mess in her house. He could almost hear her nagging voice, whipping around a broom, bending low at the waist to get to the corners.

 

They settled into a haphazardly cleared out guest room sprinkled with dust bunnies and decorated with bad print outs of unknown movie stars and obscure artists. The cramped space became loaded with tension within no time, when Steve and Barnes locked gazes and started circling each other.

 

Sam felt out of place, simultaneously tired and buzzed, holding Enano Braga’s passport, looking at the catatonic men he was ushering along, in this part of the world he had never seen before. He felt like lying down and sleeping for a month. He felt like getting a plane back to D.C., to his old, worn-out life. He felt like screaming at the disgustingly blue sky, going: “What the _ever-loving fuck_ am I doing here?”

 

As always, he kept his head down.

  


*

  


Sam wouldn’t have admitted to it, but the month spent in Berlin was in summary a month of his life he spent watching Barnes.

 

Of course, Barnes was plenty to look at. He could be eerily still, though his pale eyes managed to remain expressive, flickering this way and that. His body, though painfully thin, retained an unnerving, feline grace. The metal arm, when uncovered, was enough to keep Sam distracted with astonishment and horror for a good half-hour. He found it increasingly hard to connect the strange, bony man with the faded, black-and-white soldier he had learned to know from textbooks.

 

He found it even harder to look at Barnes, at his bloodless face, and think about seventy years worth of data, of a chair and a rubber mouth-piece.

 

Barnes himself, despite his worryingly low caloric intake, was constantly buzzing. From the moment they set foot in Berlin his eyes had been flickering this way and that, languages pouring out of his mouth with almost unnatural ease.

 

He drank beer with Dieter, humoring their host’s peculiar interests. The second day of them collectively ‘laying low’ saw him speaking to junkies and Turkish mothers, buying newspaper off a beggar and charming Dieter’s neighbors to bouts of carefree laughter. The first Sunday of their Berlin stay-in, he attended a demonstration against rising rent prices.

 

Steve trailed behind him with stiff shoulders and furrowed brows, a joint permanently tucked behind his left ear. It was almost laughingly easy to get weed in Berlin. And a guy like Steve – well, no one would ever think to control him.

Weed remained the one thing they all had in common – including Dieter, when he deigned to appear from his dank, dark study for a few hours. Steve rolled up, Barnes struck a match on a joint of his metal arm and then they took turns taking hits.

 

 _Lord, how is he functioning?_ Sam would often catch himself thinking. He didn’t know how Steve was functioning, either. Or how he himself had managed to come this far and still feel out of his depth all the fucking time.

  


*

  


Riley had kissed him in secrecy on a stormy, gray afternoon, with no one around to witness but the pigeons flocking around the fire escape.

 

It had been the start of something tolerable, nice, maybe even good. After all those months of nothing and nothing and nothing at all.

 

Of course, Riley was gone. That simply was the nature of things.

  


*

  


There was the incident at the record store.

 

Sam had been fifteen and obsessed with hip hop, mouthing along the newest hits on the radio. Tupac had yet to be shot and only just dropped his second studio album. The summer was blazingly hot, baking the concrete that served as the backdrop to the solid two months of free time. Sam studiously read all the books on the school list, getting them from the library and returning them the moment he finished.

 

When he wasn’t reading, him and Jorell loitered inside the nearest record store, flipping through covers and swaying to the soft blues that were always playing. He managed to save up enough to buy the “ _Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z…”_ album cover as a poster, which he then gave to Jorell as a Christmas present in the following winter.

 

It was probably one of the most selfless things he’d done in his life.

 

Tupac continued to glance down at them from Jorell’s bedroom walls for the coming years, his chin raised in defiance, black and beautiful and strong, everything Sam longed to be. Though ultimately, he longed for a life of respectability more – that was his main thought almost four years later. Tupac, meanwhile, was shot dead through the rolled down window of a white Cadillac.

 

It was that fateful early afternoon in late August. Jorell had come down with the flu and Sam had helped his Mama cook all morning. He went to the record store alone with a spring to his step, loving the sun in his face and the sweat in his nape. It had been a good day thus far, with his Mama laughing at his jokes and swatting him playfully. They had chicken and peas with tater tots for lunch, a special treat.

 

Inside the record store he walked around, flipping through the pop and rock sections, studying the faces of Bruce Springsteen and Kurt Cobain. He thought about the last school assigned book he’d read, _Animal Farm_. He had gone to the library just to read about George Orwell, afterwards, intrigued with the witty language and the much grander meaning he sensed behind the squabbling pigs.

 

“Hey, kid!”

 

His head shot up so fast he felt his neck crack. The shop owner, who rarely came in himself, was standing a few feet away from him, hands balled to large fists at his sides.

 

“Show me your pockets!”

 

Sam stood paralyzed. He remembered that feeling with such acuteness, the immediate shame burning down his throat despite him having done nothing wrong. He ended up showing the man his pockets, which were empty save for a few candy wrappers and a small notebook. The shop owner wasn’t deterred, however. He grabbed Sam by the collar of his T-shirt and marched him through the store, tossing him out the door with people watching left and right.

 

He remembered sitting on the sidewalk, crying fat tears of bitterness and embarrassment, thinking about Tupac, thinking about nothing at all.


	5. The Wide Landscapes of Our Insides, or: Mourning the Living

_THOUSANDS_

 

They managed to shake off their tail after five hours of doubling back and taking bumpy roads through sleepy villages.

 

“Yer a fuckin' menace, you know that, Steve? You can't drive to save _all_ our damned lives, you can't dance for shit, you and your fucking pragmatist yappin'.” Bucky was slouching in his seat, eyes methodically scanning their surroundings. They were somewhere in the vicinity of Hanover, a city that remained gray, bombed-out and bland inside his mind, even though he had only ever seen wartime photographs.

 

Damned serum-enhanced memories.

 

Bucky’s stare was heated. It sparked something akin to anger, or frustration, something liquid and blazing inside his gut: “That's a lot coming from you, pal. You can't even finish half a donut, you're gonna starve – eat a sandwich and we'll talk about self-preservation!”

 

In the backseat, Sam sighed, long and loud.

  


*

  


Berlin was a marvel.

 

Steve started sketching again. He had taken to doodling on book margins and collected Hydra files during their search for Bucky, but now he headed out and bought a notebook with 5 of Romanoff’s 10,000 Euros that she had provided in cash, adamant on avoiding electronic trails.

 

Dieter, their contact person, had the most cluttered, dank apartment, with walls three meters high and faded, crumbling stucco on the ceiling. To Steve, it was comfortable, attractive, even – it reminded him of his life before the ice, full of broken, hoarded things, jars of pickled vegetables and folded newspaper spreads. He sketched the narrow sky over the turn-of-the-century buildings. He sketched a loaf of sourdough bread half peeking out of its paper bag. He sketched their crowded little guest chamber.

 

He sketched Bucky. Of course he did.

 

He’d woken up in stages. It started with speaking Russian to the airplane hostess, a familiar corner of his mouth tugged up in a half-smile. Then he made smalltalk with random passersby in German. A taxi driver he spoke to in Arabic. On the second day, Dieter told them in utter fascination that Bucky had an authentic Bavarian accent when speaking German.

 

“I had a technician from Munich,” Bucky told them all, unfazed. “He programmed me a lot, I think. No, I’m sure.”

 

It still made the acid inside Steve’s stomach rise up. He’d dutifully read all the files Romanoff had translated, doing it day by day, uncovering a tad more information to rest inside his chest with jagged, cutting edges. Hearing Bucky talk about it so nonchalantly had him close to exploding with anger and helplessness.

 

After a few days, he started going out alone.

 

Well, at least he tried. Steve followed him, tight with worry. They were supposed to be lying low, trying their best not to attract attention. At the same time, it felt wrong to deny Bucky access to the outer world, after everything. So they had kebabs at shoddy bistros, and Pho soup, and fancy-ass Korean barbecue, and slippery-tasty Ramen noodles. Steve also had a lot of burgers.

 

Bucky ate a few bites of everything, letting Steve finish most of his meals. But he looked content, he looked alright. He was there, and he was back with Steve. It was utterly strange to fall back into this companionable presence, after coming out of the ice, after S.H.I.E.L.D., after Donny and the constant surveillance and medication. At times, he felt so out of place that he longed to reach out and touch Bucky’s shoulder, his gleaming, clicking left hand, just to be certain that anything existed at all.

 

Then they fought.

 

And it became real.

  


*

  


“It had to be done! I did it for you, too –“

 

“Oh, tosh, ya' just wanted the big muscles –“

 

“I would've died come winter, otherwise –“

 

“You think I don't know that? I coddled yer skinny ass back to health every single time –“

 

“I did it for you! I saved you, I came for you –“

 

“Ye' did jack shit for me! Fuckin' busy being a Nazi fightin' hero –“

  


*

  


“Stop,” Bucky told him a few hours later. Outside, the sky was tinged pink and blue over the monotone of the German countryside, the moon a pale shape against a cloudy backdrop. Sam had briefly fallen asleep in the narrow backseat of their stolen car, the tension bleeding out of his limbs. He scrambled awake once Bucky poked him in the knee, swearing and panting.

 

“We’re here.”

 

Steve squinted at the sign at the side of the highway, his insides knotting with anxiety. He had always been good with maps – even more so after the serum. He knew what lay in Hanover’s vicinity, in the heart of Northern Germany.

 

“Bergen Belsen? What in God’s name did you take us here for?” Sam tucked open his seating belt, slowly unfolding himself from the car’s backseat. His eyes were weary in the dying light, as they always were. Bucky didn’t deign to answer and started walking. Steve locked the car and made to follow, his heart thudding inside his chest painfully.

 

The former concentration camp had been transformed into a memorial site, the architecture sombre, consisting of straight, boxy lines. The site and its adjoining museum were closed at the late hour. Undeterred, Bucky spied around before finding a spindly tree planted next to the wall, climbing it with ease, reaching the top and rolling down with one smooth motion.

 

Nothing stirred.

 

“I’m not goin’ in, man.” Sam had his shoulders hunched, looking to the ground with a deep frown. He extended his hand and Steve dropped the car key in his palm before nodding briefly. The moment lasted for a while, unspoken sentiments hanging in the air.

 

Then Steve jumped, his enhanced body coming to life at once.

  


*

  


Their second week in Berlin saw Bucky starting to read.

 

He did it without pause, not to eat, or sleep, or shower. He clicked around Wikipedia on Dieter’s old computer, he read websites and forums, book reviews and online articles. He scrolled through blogs and facebook profiles, he sped through documentaries on YouTube without even so much as blinking.

 

Steve watched him read, and sketched.

 

“Do you not want to know what happened? What happened in the last seventy years?” Bucky asked him once, half-dead with sleep deprivation. “I want to know so bad, Steve.”

 

“I don’t.” Steve had answered truthfully. He had wanted the imagined quiet of death more than anything – until now. There hadn’t been a reason for him to be truly interested. He had kept a list of things people mentioned to him, but it was more a formality than anything else. He hadn’t wanted to know the 21st century, let alone all the decades preceding it.

 

Bucky, however, he _devoured_.

 

Dieter took a burning interest in Bucky from the moment they stepped foot into his apartment. He started appearing with books on the Cold War, on East Germany, the Reunification and the Berlin Wall. In retrospect, it should have become clear much earlier – that Hydra wasn’t the only one invested in capturing the Winter Soldier.

  


*

  


The premise stretched out before him, miles upon miles of grass, with smatterings of trees, tombstones and raised earthy plateaus edged with numbers marking the dead that lay beneath them, unnamed and gone. Mass graves, thousands. None of the original buildings still stood. It seemed peaceful, bathed in the softest hues of colors that came before the nighttime blue.

 

Steve paused whenever he encountered a tombstone. Some were gleaming new marble, others so weathered he could barely make out the names and dates in the half-light. Some were covered in stones and pebbles, others only had a few placed on the ground before them. A lot of the names were written in Hebrew, which he didn’t know at all.

 

“Pawelek Przeworki,” he mumbled, knowing that Bucky could have pronounced the names right. “Weiczner Gáspár. René Paty. Zager Kalman.”

 

The obelisk rose before him, cutting into the sky harshly. His eyes picked out Bucky’s crouched form beneath it with ease. He approached slowly, weighed down with dread and watchful of security personnel that might pick out his movements if he walked too hastily.

 

“Do you remember St. Louis?” Bucky glanced up at him. His hair had fallen open, the strands feathering down to his shoulders, masking half his face. “The Jews, they were on that ship looking at the lights of Miami, and now, now they just might as well be right here, beneath us.”

 

“I remember,” Steve replied. He felt choked up, like his asthma had magically returned with the sour memory.

 

“What in God’s name did we fight for, Steve? War comes after war and all we can do is count the bones.” Bucky motioned for him to sit down. Steve slowly crouched, trying to make himself small, less conspicuous, less strange.

 

“We felt like we were delivering justice. We felt so righteous. Did you read about Vietnam?”

 

“Donny told me some.”

 

“Did you read about the Middle East?”

 

Steve shook his head slowly, feeling tired beyond all else: “To be real honest with you, Buck, I was a goner. I was done with it all. You think I believe in anything? I believe that you’re back. That you’re my friend. That’s all, Buck, that’s all.”

 

“That is horse shit and you know it.” Bucky bumped their shoulders together briefly. The touch made Steve start, jolting through him like high voltage. “I came here because I’m a killer, of men and women and children. _Wait_ – let me finish! I’m a killer, I was one before Hydra made me. I was a killer and a fool, a real naive fool. And so were you.”

 

“You still believe in the flag? What it stands for?”

 

Bucky snorted a laugh, his wry smile jabbing Steve deep in his chest: “What did that flag ever give me besides death? Did it feed our empty stomachs? Did it give you medicine when I fetched your fuckin’ priest for a coupla’ final words? Did it save me from Hydra?”

 

The words resonated within Steve, but they also stung. So he hung his head and kept his silence. It wouldn’t do to start a screaming argument, to disturb the peace this place deserved, more than anything.

 

“You know what I think, Steve? Hydra is fascist from the root up – and fascism knows no nation. It spreads. You saw it, deep inside Peggy fucking Carter’s precious S.H.I.E.L.D., ain’t it so?”

 

“Don’t talk about Peggy like that,” Steve bit out, gritting his teeth to keep from yelling out loud. “We had no choice. We had to fight.”

 

“Why, yes. I agree, Rogers. We had to. But don’t you dare start making yourself into the hero people wanna see.”

 

Steve buried his fingers deep inside the dirt ground, angry tears welling up. Bucky always had ways of finding the wound and putting his finger to it. He never let Steve have it easy, _never_. Hydra had made a different man out of him, with blood and electric currents and gentle words. Yet, at the same time, they really hadn’t.

 

“I fuckin’ hate yer guts, Bucky Barnes,” he chocked out. Inside him, something hot was blooming, slow like molasses, vibrant, scorching. It hurt, Bucky hurt, his words, his piercing looks. But it was as if he had never felt anything else before, like someone had just taken a knife to his hand and cut his palm open, going: “ _This is your blood, this is why you live._ ”

  


*

  


Dieter sold them out at the end of the month.

 

He had talked to Bucky for long nights, about Gramsci and his prison notes, about Marx and Engels and Hegel. About all the people that came after their time, bearing similar thoughts, wanting to end suffering, to have a good life, with bread and with roses. To change everything for the better. Steve listened with half an ear, catching names he had heard before, briefly, and some that were completely foreign. Bucky sucked up the new information like a drowning man gasping for air.

 

“The end of the Cold war has come and gone, and still people question things.” Bucky told him three days before Dieter turned on them. It was well past midnight – Sam was asleep on the couch, snoring softly. They were sharing the guest room bed, like grand old times, heads almost touching, speaking in muted whispers.

 

“Donny, he protested all his life, ever since he came back from his war.”

 

“I wanna meet this man,” Bucky said, “By your God I don’t believe in, I do wanna meet him.”

 

“You will.”

 

“I won’t.”

  


*

  


“ _To the memory of all those who died in this place_ ”

 

That was part of the inscription on the wall he could read. He carried it with him, back over the wall, to the pink VW Beetle with Sam inside it. Bucky remained beneath the obelisk and didn’t crawl back into the front seat until the clouds above them were luminous with another sunrise.

 

Steve left him to his mourning and kept his own silent.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_HUMONGOUS ISSUES_

 

The first official public appearance of Captain America was orchestrated through a pre-recorded CNN interview with an empathetic female host sporting a bleached, million dollar smile.

 

Tony had followed the twenty minute Q&A session with the defrosted, stoic national icon in a drugged out haze, jittery and high on a cocktail of stuff thank-Jesus-Almighty he couldn’t recall properly. Howard Stark, his late, absent, thoroughly car-crashed dead father had spoken of Rogers as basically the Second Coming ®. A chiseled, blond god that young Anthony had learned to use as a benchmark for everything, including himself.

 

The Captain America that appeared on prime time television drew more than sixty million viewers on a global scale.

 

To Tony Stark, he was a thorough disappointment.

 

“First off, thank you so much for being with us this evening. It is truly a pleasure, Mr. Rogers.”

 

“Why, thank you for having me.”

 

“May I ask – how have you been doing?”

 

“Ah, ma’am, mighty fine. Enjoying the modern television set they gave me, you see.”

 

Tony had cringed at the reporter’s nervous, quick laugh. Though her put-upon, stiff professionalism was preferable to the dead-eyed, wooden performance Steven G. Rogers slapped on his visage for the sake of the camera. He had been spot on, perfect for the whole twenty minutes, with impeccably combed hair and not a trace of real emotion.

 

A year and a half later, after they had fought alongside each other in New York, Fury asked for his help in regards to the good Captain. It all came together, then.

 

Tony couldn’t have claimed to be especially surprised.

  


*

 

Barnes stole like a motherfucker.

 

Jarvis tracked them all across Germany towards the Dutch border, circling back until entering Belgium with their funny little pink princess car. Tony spent his nights wide awake, unaware of the time difference and the regular meal plan he had agreed to last new year’s eve.

 

Fury had his people, whatever few were left, set on tracking the trio infernale. Hydra, very obviously, had out all its slimy tentacles, probing people in the international intelligence community left and right – police higher ups, secret agents, bored former military operators, they all received an offer to turn.

 

Unsurprisingly, many did.

 

Pepper barged in on him at ten P.M., which by all accounts was a normal, sane time to be awake, waving a pair of chopsticks and a takeout box. She half-perched on Tony’s stool, eyes squinted in the blueish light of the security footage they were watching.

 

“My god, did he just steal barbecue chips? And gauze?”

 

“He sure did.”

 

Barnes was a bitch to capture on video. But whenever he did, he was awarded with little shock moments that sent him reaching for the whiskey bottle. Sickly thin, even under layers of clothes, he was recognizable enough. He also looked close to death – more so than ever. He had looked deranged, but strangely alright while on the run. Under Hydra, ironically enough, he had been tube-fed by the finest of North America’s nutritionists.

 

“You are going to be at the press conference eleven sharp,” Pepper told him later on, unamused frown gracing her smooth, impeccably made-up face. He knew for a fact that she used between 25 and 32 products, morning and evening routines, and doled out heaps of cash for facials. He couldn’t give two shits about the facials.

 

“What press thing?”

 

“The annual fiscal report, _eleven sharp_.” She waved in a small, dark-skinned woman, a cleaner by the looks of her uniform, and pointed a manicured finger towards his work space. “Meanwhile, this place could use some tidying up.”

 

Tony tuned out her voice, replaying Barnes’ entrance to the Carrefour near Bruges.

  


*

  


A solid five days later, Tony decided to contact Wilson – much for the sake of his own sanity, as much as needing an inside voice. To gauge the mental stability of Captain Crazy and the physical deterioration of Mr. Traumatized-and-Starving Barnes.

 

The terrible trio was laying low in between Rouen and Le Havre, having ditched their conspicuous lolly pop car and switched to wearing hats and hoods on public transport. It made them infinitely easier to track. Jarvis periodically came up with solid seconds of footage that showed them entering train stations, leaving platforms, taking seats in train wagons.

 

Wilson wasn’t difficult to contract, either.

 

He still had his civilian phone, mostly turned off and with the chip removed, but he had kept his US number, which all Tony had to do was continuously call until it encountered Wilson’s “phone a friend” and “talk to your mom she loves you” time.

 

“Listen, man, we’re a bit busy here,” Wilson had the long suffering tone of stressed parenthood down pat. “I’m just making sure we all have dinner with vegetables at seven and don’t get shot in the face.”

 

“That’s very admirable, I applaud your perseverance. I have an offer for you – I know our two national treasures are bound to go off the grid in a rampage if I try to talk logic, so I’m appealing to _your_ common sense: Bring them back to the homeland and I’ll make sure they have their joint, padded apartments at my tower.”

 

Wilson remained silent, which Tony took as a cue to talk more.

 

“We are in rebuild mode here, you see? The tragically tattered remains of S.H.I.E.L.D. are sitting outside the offices of my HR department, waiting to be gainfully re-employed. Get them back and we’ll talk about your special skill set, okay amigo?”

 

“I’ll get them to Ireland, which is where they’re going, anyways.” Wilson sounded downright sardonic, which was one hundred percent fine with Tony. “At least, that’s where Barnes is headed, as far as I can tell.”

 

“That’s perfect, that sounds good. I’ll send you a team any time you want.”

 

Wilson reluctantly promised to give updates and, if necessary, behavioral reports. So that was a whopping success.

  


*

  


Fury had asked to use Stark Tower as an evaluation space of sorts.

 

Every time Captain America was deployed some place or other, he would report to New York from D.C. and spend a full few days with a couple shrinks who wrote lengthy reports that went back to Fury.

 

“This isn’t just a favor, Stark,” the scary one-eyed motherfucker had said over the secure phone line, “this is cooperation. The Captain distrusts S.H.I.E.L.D., he refuses to meet with personnel at the headquarters. You can provide the needed environment – listen, he knew your old man, he has ties to you. We need to get him under _control_.”

 

Tony agreed, of course he did.

 

The Steve Rogers he encountered was a wrecked, nervous man that spoke to walls and often looked distant, in a decidedly non-dreamy, very much deranged way. He finished all his S.H.I.E.L.D. assignments without a hitch, smoothly partnering with that cold, prickly Romanoff woman.

 

But mostly, Rogers, the blond God of perfection Howard had once created, very clearly had the objective of dying.

  


*

  


He had an argument with Pepper about something irrelevant his brain ejected as soon as she brought it up – which was the problem, this he was intellectually capable of understanding. He just couldn’t really bring himself to care.

 

Afterwards, she sent a cleaner to his lab with strict orders to wipe down all surfaces, very probably just to spite him.

 

Jarvis had compositioned a new scan made from the few glimpses they had caught of Barnes’ Hydra-made fascist bionic arm. Tony had felt himself teeter on the dangerous verge of obsession, which he knew Pepper would dislike, but once again – he didn’t care very much. Not when such a thing of beauty was coming closer and closer to him and his lab, though at a frustratingly slow pace.

 

Wilson had sent in their coordinates just yesterday. The traveling trio had now reached Britain and were creeping their way up the southern countryside.

 

The cleaner, a small woman he might have seen before, worked carefully around his scattered tools and towering paper mountains, dusting here and there, spraying disinfectant on things she deemed too dirty to just wipe down.

 

Tony kept to the bionic arm scan and tried to ignore her, the flare of annoyance at Pepper souring his mood and the new bottle of Macallan Jarvis had bought at an auction in Hong Kong last month or so. He replayed some of the newest scenes, tracking Cap’s hunched shoulders and Barnes’ quick movements. Wilson was always behind them, looking left and right, cautious of any changes.

 

From the corner of his eye, he registered a stilling of movements. The cleaning lady had ceased her careful puttering and was staring at his holographic screen with large, awed eyes.

 

“Hey, senora, that’s the door right there – comprende?”

 

She gave him a quick, weary look before inclining her head and leaving the lab with silent steps. Tony tamped down his irritation and turned back to hacking his way into a Burger King’s security camera in Uxbridge, just outside of London.

  


*

  


There were three video sequences he sent Romanoff once she contacted him from God-knows-where in that giant shit-hole called Eastern Europe. She had requested a status update on the traveling trio, offering in return several thousand terabytes worth of Red Room/Hydra data, newly digitalized from the depths of an soviet era archive.

 

The first sequences he grabbed from a surveillance camera of a gas station just outside Liverpool: Ten seconds of grimy footage in which Wilson, Rogers and Barnes could be spotted getting off a bus, all wearing base caps and sunglasses. There was nothing intriguing about it besides the fact that the formidable Captain and the Winter Soldier seemed to be arguing like a pair of teenagers.

 

Tony had set Jarvis on lip reading, which yielded the following contents: “ _There can only be […] anti-authoritarian communism […] the state […] you fucking punk._ ”

 

The second sequence was by far the most voyeuristic, even by his standards. It was gritty security footage from a gay bar in Chester, a flat, depressing building that he looked at from all available satellite angles. The three voyagers had by now reached Holyhead, a Welsh port town that had ferries heading for Dublin every other hour.

 

He knew that it was nearing five o’clock in the morning, even with the floor to ceiling windows put on night setting. Dum-E was clanking around, working on a cooling unit project he had abandoned months ago.

 

It had been an easy thing to enhance the video quality and zoom in on the happenings. He replayed the available eleven seconds, again and again, nursing his pounding headache with a tall glass of gin. Barnes had his head bowed, he was laughing, speaking to a man in his early twenties. They kissed, forcefully so, and stumbled out of view.

 

Alun Maddox, as Jarvis quickly found out, was no one remarkable at all. A sales clerk at a Superdrug store, born and bred in a Cheshire hamlet, he had never left the UK save for a trip to Malága in 2009. He frequented the few gay locations Chester had to offer on a weekly basis.

 

This was the third clip he sent Romanoff: two seconds of footage from the very same camera, not even five minutes later. Steve Rogers hadn’t bothered to make himself inconspicuous, his bald, shaved head gleaming under the street lamps. He seemed to be in a hurry, with his shoulders hunched and brows drawn.

 

He looked angry, to say the least.

  


*

  


“My old man,” Tony slurred, reaching out to pat Howard Stark on his stiff shoulder. “I’ve been doing good, whaddaya say, huh?”

 

No answer came.

 

“I stopped your goddamned weapon production, good for the conscience, _ha_!” He took a sip of his gin, or whatever he was having at the moment. “I’ve been looking after your fucking super soldier, haven’t I?”

 

Howard Stark frowned at him, unmoving.

 

“They pumped him full of anti-depressants, that’s for sure. It was for the better. Don’t look at me like that, Daddy-O.”

 

No answer.

 

“I’m rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D., hows that? Your legacy and all.”

 

Nothing.

  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_DEEPER MEANINGS_

 

Doug Jr. had four children.

 

Sam had never met them, but he tracked their growth on social media: Imani, Caleb, King and Malcolm wore stylish clothing and posed for pictures. They showed off their braided hair and rolled around on the ground in short videos, happy and unconcerned.

 

While Sam had been with the army and Jorell at the correctional facility in Marcy, Doug had started going to community college and working at a grocer’s. He still lived in Harlem and meddled with the same crowd, still smoked and drank and called in the occasional favor, but he developed the reputation of a genuine, good man with a simple life. His wife was a pious woman who had the craziest church outfits and an extended family down in Texas.

 

Clicking through their pictures on Facebook gave Sam a hollow ache, from his chest down to his stomach.

  


*

  


“Listen to this,” Barnes said, pointing the thick joint in his metal hand straight at Steve, who was crouched next to him, eyes glued to his wayward best pal’s animated gestures.

 

Barnes started fidgeting on the chunky, old hotel computer, scowling and typing until a YouTube video started playing with a God-awful, tinny sound quality. Sam leaned against the far wall, tracking their movements with the concern of a pre-school teacher. They had been talking in random, incomprehensible sentences for a few hours now, exchanging meaningful looks, growing animated and loud one second, silent and mournful in another.

 

The music seemed familiar. Sam frowned to himself as Barnes inhaled deeply with his strange, pale eyes half-lidded and passed the joint to Steve, who immediately started sucking on it, finishing three grams of weed in a few breaths.

 

“TONIGHT I’M GONNA HAVE MYSELF A REAL GOOD TIME!”

 

Sam jumped half a foot into the air. Barnes had risen from his seat, bellowing at the top of his voice. His, frankly, very clear, pleasant voice. Steve remained in his crouch, holding the stump of the joint, mouth half-open with awe. Sam cringed, tapping his foot to the up-beat tune despite his dark mood.

 

“THE WORLD TURNING INSIDE OUT!” Barnes sang, opening his arms as if to embrace the room in general. He was so painfully thin – Sam couldn’t remember him eating since leaving London. His long hair was tied back in a limp ponytail and the bruises underneath his wide eyes were a faded blueish purple.

 

“ECSTACY!” Freddie Mercury intoned through the crackling speakers. Barnes was stretched towards the ceiling, his mismatched arms flexing and whirring as he yelled along the lyrics.

 

“I’M A SHOOTING START LEAPING THROUGH THE SKY LIKE A TIGER,” he told a grinning Steve, making a playful snapping motion with his teeth which ended up looking much too real, almost feral, to Sam. Steve laughed, however. He made to stand up, only to get a little shove from Barnes, sitting back down on his ass. His eyes were brimming with oblivious happiness.

 

“THEY CALL ME MR. FAHRENHEIT!”

 

_Caught up in their little world,_ Sam thought. There was a tinge of bitterness to his thoughts, though mostly he was simply overwhelmed with horror at the joyful display. A pair of men, two friends who had known each other always – worn down to near insanity, soaked in blood and piss and regret. It boggled his mind, how Barnes was singing. How he had woken up at all.

 

“The music sure has gotten better,” Steve said, hands busy rolling up while tracking Barnes’ movements with his eyes. In a complete contrast, he looked the very picture of good health – from the sheen of his bald head to the flush in his cheeks.

 

“I’M HAVIN’ A GOOD TIME – I DON’T WANNA STOP AT ALL!” With an almost eerily precise spin Barnes turned to him, smiling broad and happy. It created such dissonance that Sam had to blink a few times, taking in the sallow complexion, his sharp cheekbones and the relaxed tug of his eyebrows. A killer, a weapon, a man.

 

“I’M A SEX MACHINE READY TO RELOAD!”

  


*

  


Barnes had the questionable talent of finding the seediest neighborhood, whichever city they happened to be in. He started scoping out the best dealer in the streets, watching their transactions with hawk eyes before Steve and his safe white boy looks went ahead and bought their daily dose of ganja. He also took other drugs, popped them like candy – Sam knew that he should have paid closer attention, but he couldn’t bring himself to look too closely.

 

E, coke, ketamine, opiates.

 

It simply never had any observable effects. On any normal person the cocktail would’ve resulted in a coma, at the very least. Barnes had unpredictable moods: he could belt out songs at the top of his lungs one minute and sink into a bony pile of silence the very next. It occurred to Sam, somewhere in between their constant traveling and his perpetual fatigue, that Barnes was trying to _feel_ , to test his own limits. What his foreign body could endure. They had already boarded the ferry to Dublin when he realized that Steve had also been taking the random pills.

 

Of course.

 

Then, there was the sex.

  


*

  


The evening was wet with misty downpour outside their hotel window. Steve was having himself another room service club sandwich, watching the television while chewing away stoically. Laid out before him was a new Red Room file, detailing the mechanical inner life of an early version of the dreaded bionic arm. His free hand was doodling nervously along the margins of the Dublin Gazette.

 

Sam was sitting up in bed, going through their cash with nimble fingers: They had about three thousand Euros left, which would conceivably pay for a week, considering their costly drug habits. Stark had contacted him only the day before yesterday, promising a swift extraction that was already on the way.

 

Barnes, once again, was nowhere to be found.

 

Steve gave an impatient sigh, swallowing a final mouthful of bread before flicking his eyes back and forth between the door and the window, another one of Barnes’ favored entry points. His mouth was a single, tight line – a sure sign for an outburst, followed by an immediate search mission.

 

“Listen, man. You know where he went the last two times. He’s gonna be back before morning, alright?”

 

That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say.

 

“Hydra has been following our asses all across Europe. He _knows_ he shouldn’t be out gallivanting.”

 

It was Sam’s turn to sigh: “What you gon’ do, huh? Rip him out from under his one night stand? Man, what is it? Is it the gay thing?”

 

Steve flinched violently, teeth gritted and gnawing, the unnaturally built muscles of his arms flexing. He looked downright miserable, especially considering the way his face lit up whenever Barnes so much as moved his little finger.

 

So it was the gay thing.

  


*

  


“Have they sufficiently explored their heritage? Enrolled in a Gaelic language class? Sam, my man, tell me, what have you three jolly voyagers been doing holed up in that hotel room?”

 

“I’ve only followed them, you know that. I have no idea whatsoever what the hell they want in Ireland.”

 

“I’ve sent a team, I cannot vouch for their competence, sadly… good, trusty old agents have been difficult to come by recently, thanks to our national icon and his melodrama.”

 

“Not like _I_ can vouch for either of them, I’ve told you, they are _equally_ unpredictable.”

  


*

  


Barnes led them to Parnell square on foot on their sixth day in Dublin, shoulders hunched, long hair dripping with the downpour. They stood before the memorial, the empty Garden of Remembrance stretched out behind them, veiled by the light summer fog.

 

“ _Winter became summer. Bondage became freedom and this we left to you as your inheritance._ “ Barnes voice was deep and throaty, melodic even, as he read the poem from the stone walls of the monument. “ _O generations of freedom remember us, the generations of the vision_.”

 

Sam stood back and watched as Steve went forward and put his arm around Barnes’ shoulder, humming under his breath, under the light pattern of the rain. Their humming rose and fell, a wordless tune that merged, flattened and surged, filling the wet air with a buzzing sound that seemed to have a life of its own, that seemed to reverberate with something nameless, and perhaps simply with grief.

 

Then, all of a sudden, they were singing aloud.

 

They moved closer and closer, until foreheads were touching, the tips of noses bumping together. Barnes had his eyes closed, lanky streaks of hair plastered to his pale, sunken cheeks. Steve, however, was barely blinking. His gaze was fixed on his childhood friend without a single waver, the hands clutching him close had turned white-knuckled.

 

“ _Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong_.”

 

Sam averted his eyes, discomfort making his ears burn.

 

“ _We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, for the union makes us strong_.”

 

He turned his back to them, eyes inexplicably watering- It was much later, when the song had croaked to a stop and silence had settled once again, that he felt the hot tears that found their way down his cheeks.

 

Mingling with the rain coming down over Dublin.

  


*

  


Imani, the eldest daughter of Doug Jr., turned sixteen the year Riley died.

 

She received some fifty odd birthday messages on her Facebook pin-board, a flood of kissy-face emojis and hearts. He hadn’t typed anything to line up amongst the well-wishers, just scrolled down and down, until he encountered a post from a few months ago. It was a quote, and she had tagged one of her siblings, Malcolm, a skinny ten year old.

 

Sam wrote the quote on a post-it and tacked it to his apartment wall. It was the first thing he did in his free time, four months in, besides eating mouthfuls of tasteless food and sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

  


*

  


_We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could – and must – fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name – that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning._

 

_\- Ta-Nehisi Coates_

 

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/157989795@N05/36241738600/in/dateposted-public/)


	6. Sacco and Vanzetti (Interlude)

_ LIVER AND HEART   
_

  
An image, spiked and poisonous, nestled itself at the back of Steve’s mind.    
  
Bucky, with his mouth half-opened, up against a grimy brick wall, panting into the crook of someone’s neck. His pants hanging dangerously low on his bony hips, eyes closed tightly with something akin to pleasure.    
  
It gnawed at him all throughout their three hour bus ride from Dublin to Galway, though in all honesty, the nagging feeling had been his companion for a few weeks now. Ever since Bucky had disappeared for the evening and come back languid and relaxed, lips red and bitten, a bite mark unhidden above his collarbone.    
  
He wanted to ask: “Since when have you been queer?”, and: “All the dames you paraded in front of my nose – was that just for show?”    
  
He also wanted to throw punches and scream with frustration. Because he had never once doubted that sexual liberation had to be part of the revolution they had so ardently craved. Though he had never looked at men twice, his formerly slight stature and wide blue eyes had often made him target to cruel jibes and casual punches. Steve knew, to a certain degree, what queers of his time had to suffer.    
  
Seeing Bucky with another man, however, made his stomach roil in discomfort. And he had, by now, seen him with three other men in varying positions. Kissing with tongue, jacking each other standing up, and on one occasion, with a rough hand shoved down the back of Bucky’s stolen Primark pants.   
  
Squeezed into a narrow bus seat next to the offending person, his spine itched with irritation. Bucky had the gall to fall asleep, long, dark hair fanned over his lax face. His breathing was barely audible against the whooshing highway noise, though his gloved hands twitched every now and then.    
  
Steve leaned in closer until his augmented hearing picked up the steady heart-beat.    
  
  
*   
  
  
“Tell me.”   
  
They were lying almost unbearably close, even though the hotel bed was king-sized and Sam had taken the couch halfway across the spacious room. Bucky was curled up like a dozing, lazy cat, the yellowish lamp light catching the tops of his cheekbones.    
  
“They were unhappy at first, you see. I was very uncooperative, kept on with my service number and rank. They starved me, on and off, until I forgot just to evade hunger. Then I started singing the solidarity tune, other worker’s songs. The Internationale.”    
  
Steve couldn’t bear to blink, to look away for even a second. Something massive and swelling was sealing his throat shut. Bucky had closed his eyes and was singing in a low voice that rattled him to his very bones: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth.”   
  
“For justice thunders condemnation: A better world's in birth!“   
  
Bucky smiled at him, blinking into the light: “That’s right, I sang them all our merry tunes. That confused them, for sure, the soviets. An American singing communist songs, how does that fit together? They put me in a dark box for a few months, I think. I don’t know. No one heard me sing there, just me and my stump.”   
  
Steve cautiously moved his hand until it cradled Bucky’s cheek. They were lying so close together, yet all he wanted was to get even closer.    
  
“I have lost my faith in state communism. Or all nation states, for that matter.”   
  
“Not afraid I’ll call you an Anarchist, Buck?”   
  
“Not at all, you punk, call me all you want. They knew what was what, even back in the day – Stalin ruined all the good things they tried to build from the ground up. Remember Spain?”   
  
Steve rolled his eyes but couldn’t quite manage to disguise his grin: “Do I remember the Spanish Civil War, he asks!”    
  
Bucky laughed out loud, but quickly tamped down the volume once Sam stirred on the couch. The crinkle of his smiling eyes was achingly familiar, the way he scrunched up his nose, the angle of his eyebrows. His eyes, murky and gray in the half-light, were luminous with memories of childhood.    
  
Selfish as he was, Steve wanted to be closer to him. He wanted to tuck him under his skin for safekeeping. He wanted to eat him alive, liver and heart, so that no one else would know the stories, that this moment would be his and his alone.       
  
  
*   
  
  
Remembering the war in Spain meant remembering Marjorie O’Flaherty’s older brother Jim.    
  
Bucky had been stepping out with wild-haired little Marjorie for most of 35’, trading secret kisses in alleyways and throwing each other looks across the rows of bowed heads during Sunday prayers. Steve couldn’t have said how he felt about it – looking back, he simply acquiesced to sharing Bucky’s precious time with her. It seemed natural enough.   
  
Jim, yet another of the many Jameses on their street, was ten years their senior, an impressively built man with a well-groomed mustache who worked with Bucky at the docks on occasion. He was an important member of their local Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, and got both Bucky and Steve to join with a series of impromptu, but very much impassioned speeches.    
  
Among the things Steve still knew by heart after the ice: The exact pitch of Mrs. O’Flaherty’s wailing.    
  
Jim, after much back and forth, joined the international brigades, composed of scraggly working class men, all of them volunteers, all of them carrying the cause close at heart with naught else but their bare hands. The American centuria of the Durruti Column was fittingly named “Sacco and Vanzetti”.    
  
He was promptly killed in action, torn to unrecognizable pieces by Franco’s bombs, financed by Hitler.    
  
A few months later, a chilly April in 37’ when Steve had once again come down with the flu, Guernica burned in an unholy inferno. That was the year Bucky stopped going to church, stopped speaking of God, stopped seeing little Marjorie.    
  
She married in 38’, wearing a yellowing dress that had made its way across the Atlantic folded tightly in a suitcase. She posed for her wedding photograph with her right fist raised in the anti-fascist salute, her left one holding a faded reprint of her brother’s portrait. Her husband, a fellow Wobblie, held up a poster that read “NO PASARAN”.    
  
Steve remembered attending the wedding with hacking coughs and jelly for knees. He also remembered reading the news the next morning, his throat sore and eyes watering, sickness and unbridled rage warring inside him until spots started dancing in front of his vision.    
  
Nazi Germany had just awarded Henry Ford the highest civilian medal in appreciation of his continued, long-time support of fascism.    
  
  
*    
  
  
Despite all that his Mam had once told him, Galway was a foreign place.    
  
They arrived amongst a crowd of actual tourists that had come for an art festival. It tickled something inside Steve, something that longed for beauty, for genuine laughter, for the carefree normalcy people upheld with the greatest of efforts. In the back of his head, he knew that evading Hydra had to become his life-long priority.   
  
Thankfully, Galway was a university city. They got lucky on Quay Street, finding a dealer that sold them a solid block of hashish for eighty Euros. That about covered the day.    
  
Sam got them a decent room somewhere in the city, a charming, historic house painted a garish yellow. There, they settled to their respective routines: Sam went through their remaining cash repeatedly. Steve rolled up a joint and inhaled it within a few minutes, leaning on the window sill. Bucky secured the perimeter, ate a half-hearted hand full of barbecue chips and promptly disappeared.   
  
The time seemed to pass in the tedious drip-drop of a leaking roof.    
  
By the time Bucky returned, the sky had bled into a silky night blue, the sea an inky black. Sam, surprisingly enough, had opted to go on his way this evening, mumbling about meeting someone and looking around. That left Steve, alone in the impeccable hotel room, sketching violently, trying to get stoned without much success at all.   
  
“You can hear the ocean,” Bucky told him after crawling through the window, smooth as a shadow. “And the air tastes different.”    
  
Steve only stared.    
  
Bucky’s gray shirt was slightly askew. He was sporting a fading bruise on the height of his cheekbone, shaped like a thumb print. His lip had been bitten open at some point, though the wound had already healed. Faint traces of blood still remained.    
  
“What’re you lookin’ at, punk?” Bucky threw him a playful look. It didn’t manage to distract Steve from the slight hitch in his gait, barely there to anyone who had not spent the last two months staring at him from dawn to dusk.    
  
Without further thought, Steve stood and bridged the distance between them with a long stride. His body felt foreign in times likes these, too swift, too sure – nothing like he actually felt. Something bristly and uncomfortably hot had settled inside his stomach, something painfully sharp and utterly strange.    
  
Their nose were almost touching.    
  
He stared down at Bucky, and tried to think of suffering, of the merciless cold and the gnawing of hunger. He tried to think of death and solitude, of his Mam, of God. But all that filled his mind was the man standing before him, thin and sharp, with wide eyes that had seen him at his worst and at his best.    
  
“Steve,” Bucky said, his voice breaking.    
  
Then they were kissing, with teeth and tongue and smashing lips, hands roaming, breathless.    
  
Steve felt out of place, like the world had clicked with a seamless sound and he had been left behind, guessing and blind. His hands went up and down Bucky’s torso with wide strokes, feeling for the spaces between his ribs, pawing at his slightly concaved stomach. The shoulders made up the only real bulk that was left from his formerly intimidating physique. His hand slid downwards with ease, slipping into Bucky’s pants, past his tail bone, skimming the tops of his firm ass.    
  
“Steve,” Bucky repeated, hands clinging to his shoulders like vices, voice now utterly wrecked.    
  
Steve disregarded everything, and pressed two of his fingers into the hot cleft. There was still copious amounts of slick from when the last man had fucked him – feeling for his hole was almost instinctual, the puffy, slippery glide sucking his middle finger in. Bucky made a long, keening noise, shivering violently with his face hidden against the side of Steve’s neck.    
  
“Since when?” Steve managed to ask, his voice rough from a day of silence and smoking.    
  
Bucky kept his words contained for a while, rocking back and forth on Steve’s hand, breaths coming in shaky exhales: “Since forever.” Then he shuddered violently and stilled, coming with a wordless gasp, his cock twitching against Steve’s thigh, hips gyrating in almost imperceptible circles.     
  
“What,” Steve said, and he suddenly felt dizzy.    
  
Bucky only gave a snort.    
  
  
*   
  
  
“Tell me.”   
  
They were facing each other in bed with all the lights off. Bucky’s breathing patterns were irregular, his pulse elevated. His eyes were half-lidded with a sated, sleepy look that hid the bruises under his eyes. The arm clicked and whirred at times, little noises that served as a background pattern to break up their shared silence.   
  
“You tell me,” Bucky said, mouth twisted up in half a wry smile.   
  
“I love you. I’ve always had. It’s different now, obviously – but everything fucking is.”   
  
“Steve,” they were closing the distance again, breath mingling, “don’t say that.”   
  
“Say what? That I love you? Damn well, I do. I’d never lie to you, Buck, you know that.” Anger welled up inside him, frustration, a few other things that were too fleeting to catch. He was also scared, that he could admit. Petrified of rejection. Of being left alone in the ice. Of having to chase down a mirage.    
  
Bucky leaned in and slotted their mouths together, speaking all the while: “I wasn’t made for good things. For good men like you.  _ I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve, I _ –”   
  
Steve stopped his words by deepening the kiss, biting and nipping, rolling on top of Bucky with the ease of two magnets meeting. Nothing in the world had made more sense to him, the pull of their bodies, the shared looks. All the dames he’d had back in old Brooklyn, the girls he had made time with while on tour. Even Peggy Carter. They faded in the face of the consuming agony, the bile he tasted in the back of his throat, the rage and the joy that this Bucky, this new, hollow man, induced.    
  
“This is why God placed me here, Bucky. You are why.”     
  
Bucky looked up at him, and it suddenly occurred to Steve that he was crying. “Little Stevie Rogers, still the worst communist on the block.”   
  
He reached up and traced a hand down Steve’s forehead, tapping his big, crooked nose with an icy cold metal index finger.    
  
“There is no God.”   
  
  
*   
  
  
Steve woke up at the crack of dawn with the light a grayish purple and Bucky fast asleep against his side, his lax face the image of exhaustion. Steve cupped a hand along his jawline and peppered kisses left and right of his open mouth, alien little movements that made his insides twist painfully.    
  
Then he jerked upwards and met Romanoff’s unnaturally green eyes across the room.   
  
She stood with the unassuming stance of someone waiting for their turn at the cashier's, face an unreadable mask. She was armed to the teeth, a gun in each hand, her garrote draped lightly across her neck in a morbid parody of evening jewelry.    
  
“Natalia,” Bucky said. Steve couldn’t have said when he had woken up, but they didn’t move an inch from their place tangled up together in the center of the bed. Bucky sighed, then he said something in Russian, foreign sounds rolling off his tongue with a resigned cadence, with something pleading and tired.    
  
The door opened, and in walked Sam.    
  
He, too, was fully dressed with an inconspicuous black backpack. Someone had given him a pair of para-rescue wings. “Steve, my man, let’s just sit and talk for a moment, yeah?”    
  
Bucky didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. He rolled out of bed lightning fast, opened the old-fashioned windows with a cracking flick of his metal hand and vanished from sight. For a few seconds, no one said anything at all. Then gunfire erupted out on the streets, and Steve tumbled towards the open window, catching no trace of Bucky.    
  
Instead, Dieter looked up at him with a broad grin, reloading his handgun. Meanwhile, a row of black cars started driving up the crowded little Galway street. Doors banged open and men, dressed in tac gear with their faces obscured, started getting off.    
  
He didn’t wait a second longer, not to vomit on the floor with anger, or to accost either Romanoff or Sam. Barefoot, with only a white T-shirt and his briefs on, he lunged out the window. Instead of down, however, he dug the tips of his fingers into the half-timbered walls of their hotel building and climbed up, and up, until he reached the rooftops.   
  
Then he started to run.     
  
  
*   
  
  
Logical deduction wasn’t a hardship for him.    
  
They had been sold out. Either in a joint effort, with Sam as the monitor, or with different interests backing up the chase. Maybe Dieter, their gracious Berlin host, Romanoff’s contact person, had turned Hydra. Maybe he had been Hydra all along.    
  
The loyalties he commanded had always been tenacious at best. The blatant betrayal would have smarted, would maybe have sent him into a boiling rage, in another life. In this one, his head was filled with Bucky, and the rest of the world could have burned to a crisp for all that he cared.    
  
His body took on a life of its own, ducking and jumping, racing in the only direction that he knew to make sense: the coast.    
  
In his frazzled mind, he replayed the scenes from their last night, over and over again until he felt unsure which parts he had imagined and which were real recollections. Had Bucky bitten the tip of his nose? Did they speak about Jim O’Flaherty and the war in Spain? Had he dared to lick a trace along a bony ankle? What had he dared to do at all, with something so new, so precious?    
  
He gasped in surprise when Galway Bay suddenly spread before him, sparkling almost violently in the newly risen sun.    
  
And there was Bucky. Running with a speed that blurred his form, bowed forward while the wind tugged back his hair in a sleek whipping motion. Behind them, gunshots erupted once again, shouting and angry voices.    
  
A glance upwards told him that Sam had decided to make use of his wings, soaring some twenty meters above them, straight-backed with military precision. He was engaging, but instead of aiming at either of them, he opened fire on the approaching caravan of black cars Dieter had summoned.    
  
He was covering them.    
  
In the background, the muted whine of several police sirens grew louder. Their time laying low was obviously up. His heart beat out an uneven staccato as he sucked in the salty air, old fears of asthma attacks and untimely deaths crowding his airways. The body, however, enhanced beyond all things human, gained speed, closing the distance towards Bucky.    
  
They were running straight for the Atlantic, nothing but sandy beaches ahead. A single pier stretched out into the water, with a raised platform some thirty meters tall.    
  
He screamed with all his might, and some God or other listened.    
  
  
*   
  
  
“Tell me.”   
  
Bucky was flushed to the tip of his ears. Steve was pressing down on him, supporting his own weight with one elbow, holding on to Hydra’s bionic arm with his other hand. The breeze had stilled and the moon outside was a sharp crescent against a dusky canvas. People were laughing on the streets, clinking their beer bottles together in toasts.    
  
“I’ve always liked it – taking it up the ass, I mean. Ever since I tried it back at the baths, you know?”    
  
Steve remained breathless as Bucky folded his legs upwards, his flushed cock trapped between them, leaking against both their stomachs. Bucky’s flesh-and-bone hand slid down and cupped his balls, nudging upwards until he was jacking his cock with quick, practiced motions.    
  
“It was one of the first things I remembered. How good it feels, the sex. With other fellas, with dames, with just the single trusty old right hand I’ve left...”    
  
He pressed forwards, driven by instinct, and groaned out loud when the thick head of his new, serum-made dick sank into the unbearably tight, slick heat of Bucky’s hole. They remained still for a moment, breathing together. Then he snapped his hips forwards, carefully the first few times, quicker and harder once he felt Bucky’s abdomen spasm with pleasure.    
  
“Ah – I’ll tell you, I love it. I can barely ever get enough. This new body, this – ah, ah, the stuff they shot up my veins, it’s got me jacked up like a rabbit.”   
  
They moved in tandem: hard, angry movements paired with lewd, wet smacking sounds. Steve sat himself upright, eyes fixed on the place they were joined, Bucky’s rim stretched taut and flushed a reddish violet around the base of his cock. He reached down and forced a finger inside, then two, mimicking the fucking movements, his hand gliding on slick and sweat and spit.    
  
Bucky screamed himself hoarse, trashing and panting. Steve drove into him with all the force he could muster, delirious with emotions, with disbelief and arousal.    
  
“You deserve to feel good,” he told Bucky afterwards, still buried inside him, still hard after coming two times.    
  
Jacked up like rabbits, indeed.    
  
  
*   
  
  
They were running like mad hounds. Like sprites of the grasslands fleeing the onslaught of winter. Like deer, deep in the Siberian forest, shying away from the whipping crack of a shotgun. They ran and ran, down the pier, with nothing but the ocean surrounding them, climbed up the platform with lunges, scaling the metal stairs within seconds.    
  
There they stood, looking out into the vastness before them. Behind them, the gunshots rang out like rhythmic, beating drums.    
  
“This is what I came here for,” Bucky told him, not a single bit out of breath, his chest heaving from the tears that had made their way down his cheeks in glistening streaks. His eyes were bloodshot, but so, so luminous. He was grinning, wide and unhinged, close to insanity.   
  
And Steve understood.    
  
After all, he himself had spent the last few years searching for death with a manic fervor. Coming to Ireland to die, it was fitting. It was the reason why Bucky had been so put-together, had fought so hard to appear normal. Also, why he hadn’t truly bothered to take care of himself, barely eating anything, taking drugs left and right. All the sex he’d had, searching for final highs.    
  
Still, something inside him screamed in agony at the thought.    
  
“I’ll fall with you, this time.”    
  
A train rattling, snowfall and cutting winds. Mountains, capped in snow and blood and heartbreak. This time, this time, this time he would. Jump after his best guy, the little boy who’d looked at his scraggly drawings for hours on end, the man who knew all the words to the solidarity tune. Bucky Barnes, his anchor in this brave new world.    
  
“That is for you to decide,” Bucky’s voice was heaving with his delighted sobs. Behind them, the noises were amplifying. Someone shot at them. Above their heads, Sam circled and yelled incomprehensible things.    
  
A quinjet, sleek and glinting, was closing in on them from the other side. It had Stark’s logo  printed on its wing.    
  
Despite all the noise, the waves seemed to be whispering to them, going this time, this time, this time you will, beckoning them, with its gentle depths, all the stories, all the bones, everything that ever was, song after song after song.    
  
Steve barely felt the impact, only the cold, pleasant on his skin, on his bare feet. Bucky was swimming already, diving for the deepest point, ready to stay there, stay until the blue had overwhelmed his eyes and the waves had taken his breath away. Ah, farraige, what a gentle embrace, how kind of you, how very kind, to take back your children.   
  
Spots started dancing as he slid deeper into the colorless, weightless sphere. He stretched out his hand, wanting to feel, to know they both once were, beating hearts and flesh and bone. Maybe he touched something warm – that was enough, yes, enough. To know he had lived, once, to have paid penance for his sins. Grazed his lips over Bucky Barnes’ paper-thin eyelids, barely a touch, barely there at all.    
  
And turly enough, as all things did, it started and ended with the sea.    
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	7. Imagined Archives and The Anguish of Others

_MINDS_

 

In the early hours of morning, she cataloged the Usogorsk archive in her mind.

 

The seamless trapdoor would open without a glitch, activated by a combination of touches that the Soldier knew by muscle memory alone. She would then descend into the darkness, with cobwebs tracing along her shoulders and almost inaudible steps following her down, and down, and down.

 

The Soldier had spent a total of eleven years, five months and twelve days at the underground facility USG046.

 

He knew the premises with a strange intimacy of touch. He had been allowed recollection and dreams in this early period: cryogenics were only spoken about in theory. Of course, the Soldier had been the first involuntary test subject for the practical implementations. The turning point was 1969, a transfer from a cell into a sterile little chamber, a transformation from prisoner to weapon.

 

In her mind, she walked briskly through rows upon rows of files, yellowed and brittle. She passed by bulky rolls of magnetic video tape, neatly stacked and covered with stained cloth. She picked out files by date and authorization, packing them into the bag she had brought. For posterity.

 

Behind her, the Soldier watched.

 

 

*

 

 

Natalia saw Rogers first.

 

She received a call at two o’clock in the morning, reporting a security breach at Stark Tower relating to Captain America. Maria Hill, Fury’s right hand woman, had been personally tasked with monitoring the recovery process of S. Rogers and J. Barnes, both permanently sedated and kept on two different floors of the high-rise.

 

Unsurprisingly, the most expensive and well-reputed anesthetist on the East coast had miscalculated the dose of chemical agent needed for Rogers’ ensured unconsciousness. By the time Natalia arrived in Manhattan he had already regained all reflexes of his autonomic nervous system and soiled the bed with an impressive amount of urine.

 

She spent approximately twenty-five minutes gazing at his prone, twitching form through a hastily installed glass partition.

 

“This was the security breach?”

 

Next to her, Stark shifted back and forth on his feet, clearly agitated with guilt. He chose to ignore her question, mumbling in a low voice: “It was a fucking task to fish those two out of the ocean, you know?”

 

Natalia hummed noncommittally, flicking her eyes towards Stark to indicate her attention. He looked crumpled in his slept-in clothes, hair disheveled, his neat goatee growing out of form. He had likely been fretting over Rogers and Barnes for a month now.

 

“Barnes was pretty much dead. You can thank Jarvis for the impromptu defibrillator usage – I wouldn’t have known how to revive Mr. Cyborg, I work with machine parts, not people – actually, never people.”

 

“How is Barnes?”

 

“Properly unconscious, like he should be.”

 

She sensed his distress, saw it, even. Human emotions became easy to read once cataloged. She inched closer, barely moving at all, turning her torso to face him, projecting an openness, encouraging the assumption people made in the face of her gender. The nurturing, sensitive woman, full of intuitions, full of comfort.

 

Stark was by now half-slumped against the glass wall, looking wide awake and bone tired all at once.

 

Natalia smiled at him, a subtle hint with a wink of exasperation. Cold enough to remain authentic to the Black Widow persona he knew, but with a melting edge, something small but significant. A bonding of sorts, over two Supersoldiers that needed saving.

 

It worked, of course it did.

 

 

*

 

 

Nearly a month passed.

 

Dieter called her on a secure line the day after Rogers woke up for good. He had been keeping his head down in Turkey after the successful Galway operation, keen to avoid the overzealous remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. hunting new Hydra converts all across Europe.

 

His obnoxious German tourist approach worked without a glitch, as it had many times before.

 

Rogers, Barnes and Wilson – they had been perfect bait, attracting the attention of numerous underground organizations, Hydra affiliates or not. She had by now smoked out nineteen of their safe houses, five of those in and around Berlin. She had also collected a long list of names: moles in government organizations, fascist double agents, supposedly retired scientists, scholars and doctors.

 

They all had to go, for better or for worse.

 

 

*

 

 

She monitored Rogers from one of her New York flats.

 

Stark had sent over a a full set of devices in a discreet town car, a work station made out of the newest, the best of Stark’s tech. Holographic screens, entirely touch activated, linked into secure Internet protocol. The floor Rogers was staying on had closed circuit surveillance from all conceivable angles. The cameras had state of the art motion detection and could be controlled by either Jarvis or an operator if the need arose.

 

Everything was also Hulk-proof, walls with steel cores and windows that did not open. The luxury apartment was conceivably impenetrable, even for an enhanced human.

 

It was September 27th 15:44 when Rogers started trashing all movable objects within the apartment. He laid waste to thirty-two designer furniture pieces and countless pieces of artwork, launching them against windows, walls and the glass partition with a frightening ease. He screamed, wordless noises of rage, paired with the occasional frantic calling for Barnes.

 

“ _BUCKY! BUCKY!_ ” The man in the video wailed, shown to her from five different vantage points. He was sickly pale, with a deep frown etched to his forehead that was visible even from the camera positioned furthest away.

 

At 18:00 sharp, a brief ringing sound arose, and the freight elevator in the destroyed kitchen area slid open to reveal a lavish meal on stylish plates, with gauzy gold cutlery.

 

Shoulders hunched, Rogers sat down on the scratched wooden ground and ate.

 

 

*

 

 

Someone was holding her close, his smell strangely muted. Maybe a hint of rain, pine needles and soap. The tangy smell of blood,

 

Had she spent all her life in Usogorsk? Had she trained in the woods as a little girl, watched by piercing eyes? Had she climbed trees like a squirrel, content with the soot on her hands and the pale sky above her?

 

Natalia, my little _belochka_ , the Soldier said, smoothing away her hair.

 

 

*

 

 

Barnes woke up on the 28th of September, as per Rogers’ constant demands.

 

They gradually reduced the level of hypnotic drugs in his blood, but kept infusing anti-psychotics. A cocktail of chemical agents that served to keep him calm, or at least disoriented in the likely case of a panic attack.

 

Stark had visited him in his reinforced room adjacent to the medical wing a few fays prior, tinkering and scanning the bionic arm. He had gained insight to its functioning and the technical improvements made since 1949 through a series of Red Room documents Natalia had provided.

 

Despite the severe insomnia and the general emotional upheaval, he seemed almost manic with joy while opening the panels of the arm, a robotic appliance extending from the ceiling in order to fine-tune what the human hand could not.

 

“I have to take it off, look at that, I need it off former Mr. Hydra’s-fist, pretty much first thing when he wakes up. This is the _bomb_ , Widow, look at that – prosthetics, that’s the way to go, that’s where engineering has to go. Fuck their boring-ass electronic cars, fuck MIT, they are _way_ behind on this –“

 

Natalia arrived at Stark tower just before sundown. She was escorted to the private elevators and rushed up to the 33rd floor with a smooth, soundless glide. Jarvis gave her the general directions, polite and pleasant as ever, the perfect butler, the perfect surveillance machine. Her steps made hollow, clicking sounds on the gleaming floor. A woman with a neat bun, wearing a pink cleaner’s uniform, flitted out of her way, pushing a housekeeping cart to the side.

 

She was frowning – and studying Natalia with the air of someone who was used to not being seen. Her face was round and smooth, yet there was something unsettling and sharp to her gaze.

 

“Hello,” Natalia said with the pleasant, light voice of an air hostess.

 

“Hello ma’am,” the cleaner muttered back, averting her eyes with a flick.

 

They stood facing each other for a moment. Natalia wanted to know – to look into every face and possess the certainty of knowledge. At times, that had been the only thing driving her onwards. Besides the endless flights between continents, the fast switch of her wardrobe and the vibrator working away between her legs, buzzing on the highest level. Smooth silicone, pressing against her clitoris until it hurt.

 

The cleaner was nervous: her hands twitched ever so slightly. She hid it well, holding herself still with a placid, neutral expression: “Ma’am?”

 

“Romanoff!”

 

Stark barged out a door to their left, flapping his hand around. He looked worse for wear, eyes red and bloodshot, an inflamed sore at the corner of his down-turned mouth. The cleaning woman turned away immediately, pushing her cart towards the staff’s stairwell. “Romanoff, he woke up – _oh boy_ , did he wake up –“

 

“He wants to see you.”

 

 

*

 

 

The Soldier gazed at her with hooded eyes.

 

His hair was fanned out at a dull elbow length, a tangled halo contouring his pale face. He was secured to a specialized hospital bed with vibranium cuffs: hands, feet and midriff. They were merely a few feet apart, yet she seemed to feel his presence bodily: heavy breaths, fluttering of lashes, grinding teeth. He ran hot, like Rogers, and his enhanced metabolism had eaten away all the flesh from his bones. He looked severely malnourished, as people did in war regions, during human-induced famine, every corded muscle standing out against ribs and collarbones.

 

“Did you bring me our archive, _Natashenka_?” He spoke Russian like a Muscovite of an older generation, throaty with forgetfulness and sorrow. His eyes were huge in his sunken face as he regarded her.

 

She did not answer.

 

“The years have jumbled in my head, my _lisichka_ , but I still know you. You haven’t changed a mite, have you?”

 

She kept her silence.

 

The Soldier smiled, then, a beautiful thing, a thing of a past. He relaxed against his bonds and closed his eyes. The air seemed to go still around them, even as she saw Stark’s medical team assemble from the corner of her eye. The arm gleamed, pulsing and clicking, a living thing. How she had loved to run her fingers down the seamless planes of it, the cold metal, holding her close in a blank sea of nothingness.

 

A sigh escaped her in lieu of a sob, or a cry of agony. Then she turned on her heels, retreating beyond the tinted glass windows where Stark was once again slouched against a chair, fidgeting with a StarkPad.

 

They watched the operation together, breathing in sync.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_PELO_

 

September was a disaster.

 

It poured for twelve days straight – cold, unforgiving rain that gave Ari a worrying cough and made their roof leak straight through the kitchen ceiling. She bundled her children in scarves and old jackets smelling of someone else’s moth balls. Miguel and Cisco took off the clothes before going to school, shivering and wet, defiant with their youth, desperately ashamed.

 

They fought and fought, and for a few days they refused to speak Spanish with her, using American words she couldn’t quite understand, turning their backs whenever she entered a room.

 

Rosa cried about it during work, sitting in the break room with Shanice, using toilet paper from the industrial sized rolls to dry her eyes. She felt stupid and useless, she missed home and she missed her mamá so much that sometimes her breathing constricted.

 

“You have to give those boys a good ass-whoppin’, Rosalita, that’s no way they should be talkin’ to their own mother,” Shanice told her while rubbing hand cream up and down the ashy, cracked skin of her arms.

 

But Rosa felt bone tired. She had nothing left to discipline her _hijos_.

 

 

*

 

 

Despite everything, she still noticed.

 

She wasn’t stupid, after all. The boss put her on the higher floors after another woman quit, cleaning Stark’s private rooms whenever he was away, vacuuming carpets in the luxury guest quarters and scrubbing toilet bowls at the brand new medical wing.

 

She got a new uniform and memorized twenty customized floor plans, as well as the different organic detergents Ms. Potts preferred. Shanice was the only one that she shared shifts with, and her days and nights at Stark Tower became lonely affairs. She wasn’t even allowed to speak on the phone, lest she should disturb Mr. Stark, that _carra de pero,_ who seemed to be working all the time.

 

Just like her.

 

Rosa did not so much hear the screaming as she felt the vibrations. She was on the 67th floor, wiping away the inevitable city dust when she saw the still water surface inside the murky cleaning bucket ripple. The tower was sound proofed between every level and there wasn’t much that could have shaken the building like that.

 

The green monster, the Hulk, this she knew.

 

But she had her own suspicions. Mr. Stark was involved in chasing that crazy man, Captain America, and another unknown fugitive, this was public knowledge. Cisco and Miguel had watched news reruns during dinner, where they showed spectacular explosions and shoot-outs in Europe some months ago. A lot of the news had been speculative, but she had seen it with her own two eyes: Tony Stark watching videos of Captain America, replaying the footage over and over again.

 

Despite her own worries, it gnawed at her.

 

The man, Captain America, he had been unhappy to say the least. What had he told her again, all those months ago? _They won’t let me die_ , he had said, _they are giving me medicine_. He had been defrosted by the government – a man from decades ago, with nothing and no one. Miguel had once told her about the many missions and heroics, both of his past as well as today. How lonely he must be.

 

How do governments keep people silent? How do they achieve the things they want? Those questions kept pacing through her mind. How do they buy compliance? Do they drug you if need be?

 

Those questions were rhetorical. Of course they would.

 

 

*

 

 

Rosa’s mamá called her on her cell phone during work.

 

She was on the 33rd floor, cleaning the staff toilets on the medical wing and almost dropped her phone in the wet sink with her rubber gloves on. That was unheard of – it cost an arm and a leg to call this line, and they only ever did it for emergencies. Like the day her papá died of a heart attack. Or the day one of her cousins had given birth in the dead of the night.

 

“Mamá, what is it? Is everyone okay?”

 

“ _Hija_ , it’s a travesty, they have taken them, killed them! In Ayotzinapa, you know your cousin Enaro goes to the _colegio_ there, forty-three of them are gone!”

 

Rosa calmed her mamá before hanging up and using her phone to read the latest news. It was true – the Normalistas, the students were missing. She found videos online: police halting the three buses, then opening fire on them. They were on their way to a protest commemorating the 1968 Tlateloco massacre.

 

That made her laugh out loud, a bitter, hollow sound: A massacre in the memory of another.

 

She thought of Enaro, whom she had often played with as a child. He had moved north once he married a woman from Guerrero and decided to become a teacher. It shook her to her very bones – the helplessness, standing in a supply closet amidst cleaning utensils, so far away from home, from everything that had once touched her life, everything that seemed relevant and real.

 

 

 

*

 

 

They found six mass graves with twenty-eight bodies a few days later.

 

Rosa tried to tell her children – Ari was too young to understand, Miguel and Cisco showed no interest. How foreign her own flesh and blood had become, Americans who wanted to have nice sports clothing and eat burgers at restaurants. They waved her away when she tried to get them to speak to their _abuela_ on the phone. Her Sofía remained unreachable for the first few days, busy with her life in Los Angeles.

 

That made her cry, all alone in the kitchen, even though people in the neighborhood were already collecting donations for the missing students of Iguala.

 

The congealed ball of grief mixed with the heavy feeling of strangeness that engulfed her. She had never felt more out of place. Not when she had first arrived in New York with wide eyes and no money whatsoever. Not when the useless husband left her to go God knows where. Not when her Sofía moved to the West coast.

 

 

*

 

 

Despite everything, the boss recommended her for her good performance – she was now to work separate shifts at the medical wing, where a long-term patient needed his room and bath cleaned regularly. She had to sign a series of confidentiality agreements, which meant that she couldn’t ever speak about what she saw. But it paid extra, and that was enough to convince her.

 

Rosa realized that the “patient” was a prisoner five minutes into her first shift.

 

He was a one-armed white man, secured to a bed, staring at the ceiling while she pushed in the cleaning cart, her face obscured beneath a clinical mask, as the boss had ordered. He was plugged to a few complex machines that beeped and blinked. She wasn’t to touch any of those, of course. Nor was she allowed to speak with the patient.

 

“Hello, ma’am.”

 

The man turned his head slightly to the side, regarding her with half-closed eyes. He must have been very, very sick – thin as he was, with his hair so tangled and filthy. She considered it for a moment, before replying: “Good evening, sir.”

 

Surely there was no harm to standard niceties.

 

The man laughed. He had a pleasant, throaty voice, a voice that was for singing and joking, as her mamá would have said. “Nice to be indoors, isn’t it? I heard it rained all week,” the man said, making Rosa flinch. His Spanish was Castilian, strangely stilted to her ears, much like the Europeans who traveled to her native village for adventure and exotic experiences. “ _Se_ _ñ_ _ora,_ would you tell me the date? This luxury accommodation is missing windows.”

 

“It is the fifth of October,” she answered without thinking. “The year is 2014.”

 

“ _Le agradezco_ ,” he inclined his head at her, a strange, overly formal way of thanking anyone in such a setting. Yet he had no accent at all while speaking, like he had been born and bred in Madrid, or some such. She started unloading her cart, going about the new routine, wiping down surfaces and the white-tiled floor.

Her mind was racing away from her, connecting the dots hovering before her mind’s eye. Captain America and his crazed, wide eyes. The chase across Europe. The unknown fugitive.

 

 

*

 

 

She saw him three days later, and they exchanged pleasantries once again, speaking about the expensive food the man was tentatively eating and her favorite sauce, as well as the weather, which had worsened. The white man had visibly gained weight in the span of three days – he still looked emaciated, but a hint of color had returned to his cheeks.

 

That unsettled Rosa for reasons she couldn’t quite parse in her mind.

 

The next week she came in for her Wednesday shift, the man had already put on a few solid pounds that showed all the way through his hospital gown. They spoke about the awful stench of antiseptics and cleaning detergents, laughing together briefly when Rosa unpacked her mop and almost slipped on the tiles.

 

She took to calling him _Pelo_ insider her mind, because of his long, dark hair that always hung around his gaunt face, unkempt and clotted.

 

“Do you miss the sky?” she asked him on her fourth shift, wiping down his bedside table with meticulous little rubs. “It is a different color every day, even in this ugly city, _en este ciudad fea_.”

 

“New York isn’t ugly,” Pelo laughed at her, showing a row of perfect teeth and the crinkled corners of his young eyes, “This is the most beautiful place on earth!” He paused briefly, looking pensive with his blue eyes downcast: “I don’t miss the sky, though. The sky is not for me.”

 

That shook her, for some reason. He gained more weight every time she stepped into his sickbay holding cell, and on a foggy morning in mid-October, he was sitting up, untied from the bed, with his hair cut short and styled. He moved towards her with jolted, lopsided steps, leaning heavily to the right, as if to compensate for his lost arm.

 

“I’m moving,” he said, smiling a little wistfully, like he would miss this sterile hospital room. They chatted a little bit, about this and that, impolite hot dog vendors and funny dreams of childhood they’d recently had.

 

That was the last time Rosa cleaned his cell.

 

 

*

 

 

A few days later, Shanice told her about the trashed luxury guest floor she had to clear out with three other girls: “Rich people’s all the same, I tell you – buy expensive shit and throw a big party just to bang it all up. I’ll be feedin’ five children, meanwhile.”

 

Rosa was tired from a sleepless night, buzzed on a shot of espresso and a sugary bun she’d had for breakfast. Suddenly, suddenly, _suddenly_ it all clicked together, a clear red line where everything had simply been in jumbles before. It overwhelmed her so much that for a moment, she forgot about Sofía, and her _hijos_ , and Ari. She forgot about her cousin Enaro, and her mamá, and Ayotzinapa.

 

And with a pang in her stomach, she realized that she had to act.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_TALL, DARK AND DANGEROUS_

 

For half of his waking hours, which were frankly a lot (maybe a solid 15 to 20), Tony seemed to be speaking on the phone.

 

He hadn’t ever bothered before, with the boring business people and his father’s snobbish social contacts from the olden days. Pepper had been hired to keep them at bay, and now that she regularly slept in his bed, she had fully taken over the reins. Issuing birthday cards and letters of condolences, sending people flattering, expensive gifts with added little touches that spoke of his benevolent “playboy billionaire inventor” public persona.

 

She was damned good at her job, Pepper was.

 

But now, with operation “Reintegrating Crazy Ass Supersoldiers” ongoing, he was on the phone all the fucking time. With Fury, from his obscure hiding place that Tony hadn’t yet bothered to find. With Romanoff, who had taken on surveillance tasks for Captain Angry-Ass America. He also regularly spoke to CIA and FBI officials, who were more than grateful to let him handle the massive outfall after the Triskelion business. They simply wouldn’t have had the resources to keep the two national treasures behind locks.

 

The federal government was broke as fuck.

 

He tried to reanimate the Avengers initiative, in hopes of getting Barton and Bruce Banner on board. But they were lost to the civilized world, probably in deep cover somewhere in the Middle East and meditating away the rage in India, respectively. Thor, well – he wouldn’t have known how to contact Thor even if he did believe in some fancy God or other.

 

“We need a plan for Cap and Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Dangerous,” he said to Fury while New York city was swamped with endless murky rainfall outside his floor to ceiling glass walls.

 

A plan was a good thing, however unrealistic it might me. Prime examples: Stop drinking so much, sober up and dress yourself in a clean shirt. Also: Tell Pepper you love her most of the time but are unable to express your feelings because of your dead parents. Their plan looked like this: Get Captain Rogers to cooperate, relaunch an image campaign.

 

“We have Barnes,” Fury’s projected image said to him, unphased. “That’s enough.”

 

 

 

*

 

 

He, too, had once considered death as a viable alternative to the drugged-haze his life had become. But the notion was discarded readily enough whenever a new distraction came along, be it a Victoria’s Secret supermodel or an optimized surgical robot.

 

Captain America had had the prime objective of dying ever since he was brought back. Now it seemed that James B. Barnes, the brainwashed, tortured Winter Soldier, was following in those footsteps. His body had been on the verge of collapse for the whole two months they spent on their Euro trip – the muscle tissue supporting his bionic arm had been in a constant state of tear and repair. His heart, liver and lungs working on the brink of starvation.

 

Without the bastardized Hydra serum, he would’ve been dead ten times over from just standing up and walking around.

 

Well, he looked better now.

 

It was midnight, or something like that, and the split holographic screen showed him Rogers and Barnes in their respective abodes. They had practically switched places – Rogers was now in a reinforced, patted cell designed for combat simulation, where he couldn’t break a damn thing or even just bang his head against the walls effectively. Barnes had willingly gone to the newly furnished floor assigned to him, where he was now laying on the ground, surfing the Internet with the provided StarkPad.

 

His browser history proved to be informative – Hydra’s fist had a penchant for political archival sites. He surfed _marxists.org_ , a badly designed web page providing information on the socialist movement, for three days straight, reading every last post. He also clicked on peer reviewed academic papers that he had no access to, going over the extracts.

 

Tony sipped on his Scotch, feeling a little dizzy. His stomach was roiling and he couldn’t recall the last time he had ate or slept. His breath tasted disgusting. Maybe he’d had a twinkie at six, when they brought Rogers his super-sized meal: three whole chickens, five burgers from a local deli and ten pounds of creamy mashed potatoes, mixed with peas.

 

His fingers were tapping on his work surface restlessly. Pepper had sent in someone to clean, once again, and everything was just a little off. It was a nuisance – he couldn’t wait until the day his tower would truly become fully automated.

 

“Fuck it.”

 

He knew it was hardly advisable, but he had by now spent _three goddamned months_ watching these two relics of the past on various screens. Security protocol instructed that all interaction had to be not only pre-scripted but also closely monitored. Well, who gave a damn – he was paying for the whole fucking op. If anyone was the boss here, it was him. He could speak to the guys being held in _his tower_ if he wanted to.

 

“Why hello, is that the traveling trio? No, wait, you’re missing Wilson! Where did he go, anyways?”

 

On screen, both the Captain in his padded cell and Barnes inside the apartment on 68th shot upright, strung tight like two highly lethal bows. Tony stared at them, and for a moment he could think of nothing else besides his old Dad, so absent and unfocused and wholly undeserving of his precious genius-brain thoughts. His father’s legacy, two war heroes, two suicidal maniacs.

 

“You wanna see? You wanna see me? Or each other? Do we want to do a three-way Skype kinda thing?” He knew he was drunk, his fingers were mistyping command codes and it took him three tries to activate the video feed. “Jarvis, Jar, baby, make it the big screen for the Sergeant!”

 

“Of course,” Jarvis said, voice soothingly calm yet somehow disapproving. “Sergeant Barnes, the screen is located to your left.”

 

“Bucky?” The Captain sounded disbelieving, awed, like someone just told him Christmas had come early and coincided with the fourth of July. He was staring at the screen, where both Barnes and Tony himself were now projected. “Buck, is that you?”

 

“Hey, Steve.” Barnes was standing so close to the screen that he was almost touching Rogers’ image with the tip of his nose. Tony could see him leaning heavily to the right, from another camera angle. He had gained the weight forced on him with feedings and nutritional fluids, but he still looked pale and slightly unhinged.

 

“Yeah, go ahead, talk it out, ladies. It’s bad to keep in everything, we have to express our fucking feelings – I should know!”

 

They paid him no mind, staring at each other on screen. The good Captain looked desperate, like he was about to keel over and die from the sheer frustration. His jaw was locked, making his face appear more angular, more hateful.

 

Tony finished his Scotch and poured himself another, smacking his lips together. He had read Romanoff’s report. How the two of them had slept all tangled up together, how Rogers had kissed his best buddy good morning. “ _Their positioning indicated immediate emotional attachment_ ,” she’d wrote. That cold, competent bitch.

 

“This is beautiful. I’m about to cry, it’s so tragic.” Anger gripped him suddenly, and he threw his heavy crystal tumbler to the ground with a shaking hand, splashing 150 year old Scotch everywhere. The dull thud only made him angrier: “Jarvis, exclude Captain Rogers from this conversation.”

 

Rogers’ stupidly besotted face disappeared, leaving only him and Barnes. He wanted to say something. To reach across the tower’s intranet and shake Barnes by his bony shoulders, force a reaction out of him. Instead, he terminated the conference call altogether.

 

He was on the phone too damn much, anyways.

 

 

*

 

 

He was woken up by the unpleasant ring tone he had personally programmed into his own quarters for matters of urgency. Outside, the sky was a bleak, oppressive wall of grayish clouds.

 

“Sir, I am to inform you that Mr. Barnes has requested the purchase of several items.”

 

“Wha – what?”

 

“The items are as follows: Black Velvet Anal Beads, two. Adam & Eve Dual Pleasure Vibrator, one. Wicked Sensual Care water based lubricant, five. MOQQA Vibrating Anal Plug, one –“

 

Tony tumbled out of his bed, banging his head against the side of the mahogany nightstand with a painful yelp: “What. The. Everloving. _FUCK_.”

 

“If I may directly cite Mr. Barnes? Start of quote - ‘ _I might as well get some stuff, it’s not like I’m ever leaving this place again. As far as prisons go, I’ve seen worse. But I like the eggs done over easy, ahem, that’s pretty much all_ ’ - end of quote.”

 

“Jarvis, tell me this isn’t real.”

 

“This is very much part of reality, sir, though I suppose it depends of your particular definition –“

 

“ _Don’t_ get cute with the existential philosophy bullshit!”

 

“Of course, sir. May I place Mr. Barnes’ order on Amazon.com?”

 

“Yeah, yeah – do it.”

 

 

*

 

 

Pepper found him in his lab a few days later, unshaven like some savage, and dragged his ass all the way to Malibu, where she put a strict ban on all alcoholics. Even pralines and cooking wine.

 

“You’re depressed, Tony. I’ll arrange for a therapist.”

 

“Get Captain America a therapist! Get his boy toy one, too! Did you know he likes deep anal penetration?”

 

“Who, the Captain?”

 

“Barnes! Barnes likes to take it up the ass!”

 

“No, I actually didn’t. _Don’t_ you dare turn on that screen, Anthony. Jarvis and the team will make sure everything is in order.”

 

 

*

 

 

It was sort of telling that they informed him last.

 

He returned to New York freshly out of rehab, only to find his fucking tower in upheaval and the two Supersoldiers gone with the wind. The security personnel could tell him jack shit. Fury could tell him jack shit. Even Romanoff was unpleasantly surprised by the turn of events – she had been monitoring the Captain only three hours prior to the disappearance.

 

“Did he take the anal beads?” He asked Jarvis, despairing, standing to fetch himself some prime vodka from the refrigerator.

 

“He did, sir.”

 

Eight large shots and thirty-five hours later, he finally successfully retraced their escape route. He was simultaneously so angry he wanted to tear down a building and burningly interested, because it was a challenge, a _real_ challenge. There hadn’t been a security breach under his watch for ages. He had _Jarvis_ , for fuck’s sake.

 

“Think with me,” he told his A.I. while the pale, wan sun started to rise above the New York sky line. “Wait, wait, wait – so, this is what we have.”

 

He played the security footage. Barnes, on the 68th Floor, reclining on the sofa, curled around the empty socket where the bionic arm should have been. The door slid open to his right, letting in a cleaner with her cart. Barnes sat upright, and they exchanged a few words: “ _How do you do, ma’am?_ ”, and “ _Awful weather, ain’t it?_ ”.

 

She did all her routine wipe-downs and vacuuming, puttering around. After twenty minutes or so, Barnes and her simply stood up and left the apartment. Just like that. _Just like that_. “How is this possible? _How the fuck_? Where have I gone wrong?”

 

“Sir,” Jarvis was replaying the footage, “They are utilizing Morse code.”

 

Tony sat up, scrunching up his face. His eyes were watering with fatigue, but he tried to focus, enlarging the sequences Jarvis indicated. And yes, right, that was it – the cleaning lady, she was tapping her knuckles against the antique wood she was polishing. Barnes didn’t answer at first. Four sharp taps. A pause. One tap. Three long ones.

 

Finally, he answered: “No,” he said, the first three times. The cleaning lady only tapped out: “Rogers” and “Please”. It occurred to Tony that she had especially learned the codes to communicate – that she had planned the entire thing. He zoomed in and scrutinized her face. A black woman, middle-aged, with wide eyes and a pursed mouth. Had he ever seen her before?

 

“I never look at the fucking cleaners,” he said to the room in general. “They literally come and go all the time. Jarvis?”

 

“The cleaning staff is not further monitored, sir. Their shifts cover all hours of the day.”

 

Once Barnes agreed to leave, everything went shockingly fast. He had 70 years worth of skills – he had been programmed to infiltrate governments, private organizations and militarized billionaires. Within half an hour the video feeds of three different floors were deactivated. In the fifth basement level below the ground, another cleaner opened the doors to Rogers padded cell. This one he vaguely recognized – a slight woman with dark skin and a young face.

 

“They most likely walked out the staff’s entrance, sir,” Jarvis told him, displaying a 3D map of the surrounding area. “The security feeds within the vicinity have not yielded anything useful, as of yet.”

 

Tony allowed himself another shot. His head was spinning.

 

Walked out, _just like that._

 


	8. Trains Rattling By, or: Some Dreams We Had

_FULL BODY SHIVERS_

 

This was true – most of the war had been a wondrous time for him.

 

He woke up to savor every movement: the powerful strides of his long legs, the way his heart beat remained stable, no matter the exertion. He loved looking into the forest at night, eyes picking out little details he would’ve never seen before, ears taking in the rustling sounds, the animal noises and the soft snores of his Howlies.

 

He also woke up to see Bucky, whole and healthy, _saved by Steve himself_. Carrying a rifle, joking, smiling, sleeping with his forehead pressed against his newly broad back, seeking warmth that had never existed before. He woke up for agent Carter’s flirtatious smiles and approving glances. She coveted him for his abilities, his sharpened mind, the strength of his large hands.

 

He felt like retching when he thought about it for too long. His own selfish happiness, in some frozen European mountains, in betrayal of the millions that lay dead, in betrayal of Bucky’s wayward stare, and most of all, in betrayal of a faulty little guy from Brooklyn with a crooked nose and angry eyes.

 

In retrospect, Bucky falling seemed like the inevitable punishment for his arrogance, striking him down from his adrenaline high. His unbidden luck, Erskine’s serum, it all came with a blood price.

 

But God, he had been so happy then.

 

 

*

 

 

Bucky fell asleep once Rosalita made up her son’s beds for them, frazzled and worried. She had helped them escape, and Steve had no illusions that it would at the very least cost her the cleaning job that kept her entire family fed and clothed.

 

“It is nothing,” she had said, waving her hand dismissively. “You told me before that they were giving you no-good treatments. They can’t go around giving people drugs. Now, now, stop thanking me, _dios mio_.”

 

Her sons, Francisco and Miguel, had stared at him with their mouths wide open. They silently ceded their dingy little room with wide eyes, completely in awe of him. Bucky had smiled and spoken to them in Spanish, making conversation with the same frightening ease he had always possessed. They ate a simple dinner of rice and beans, portions that left Steve’s stomach empty and grumbling, but he didn’t press. He could go hungry for a day, that was nothing compared to the hospitality and sacrifice of these people.

 

 

*

 

 

They had drawn the curtains tightly shut, to provide an illusion of privacy.

 

Bucky was breathing harshly in his sleep, eyes moving rapidly beneath the lids. Looking at him felt like taking a hammer to the guts. During their captivity at Stark Tower they had cut his hair short in a modern, stylish way that framed his thin face and made him look all of twenty years old. Steve sat there, on Francisco’s bed, and let his hands hover in the air, a strange state of limbo in which he was almost touching Bucky.

 

He wanted to scoot closer and press his nose to the nape of his neck. His fingers itched to slide up the hem of his Stark Logo sweatshirt, wander along the twist of his spine. He wanted to map every single part of Bucky Barnes to his memory, so he could die filled with the imagery of something good. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted.

 

“You are obsessed, man,” Sam had told him at one point, somewhere, sometime, “and that is not a good thing. It’s not healthy to be this invested.”

 

Steve knew he was right, and he didn’t give a damn. What the hell did Sam know, anyways? Nothing, nothing at all – not the ice, not the large blank spaces that filled his head, not the way Bucky made everything difficult and real. So fucking real.

 

 

*

 

 

When he closed his eyes, he was a bird flying high, looking down on a mountain chain, capped with snow and ice, the most blinding white and the deepest blue, jagged rocks throwing shadows sharp and clean.

 

A train, laughingly small, passed by.

 

Someone fell and someone screamed.

 

 

 

*

 

 

Steve woke up bathed in sweat, disoriented and tangled up in warmth and weight. He tried to open his eyes, but his lids seemed to be weighed down with lead. He futilely moved his eyes left and right against the darkness, feeling petrified and sluggish, his hands tingling with the lack of feeling. Were they tensed into fists? Were they relaxed against Rosalita’s purple comforter?

 

He jolted up, gasping for air.

 

Bucky was lying half on top of him, that little shit. He always did this, came back in the middle of the goddamned night drunk and crawled into Steve’s bed to warm his cold feet. He had to get up soon, he couldn’t afford to be late for his job. One and a half months of semi-homelessness, jumping back and forth between friends, sleeping on crates and spread-out newspaper during the day. God, that wasn’t living. That just simply wasn’t living.

 

“Steve?”

 

He woke up this time. His eyes felt wet, and he was shivering. He was never cold anymore in this strange, big body. Why was he shivering? He focused on a dark eyebrow, then on a worried forehead. Finally, he glanced downwards and looked into Bucky’s eyes, blue like the mountains inside his head. “Hey, sorry, I was jus’ dreamin’. I’m good.”

 

“Sure don’t feel like it, pal.” Bucky was leaning in, unbearably close, individual eyelashes tickling his chin. His voice was hoarse, like he had screamed all day long. “You were talking in your sleep. Gibberish, all kinds a’ stuff.”

 

“Is that right.”

 

They remained silent for a minute. Steve closed his eyes and thought of the sea, a soothing coolness, millions of bubbles streaming out of his nose, his mouth, pricking his skin, tickling the soft spots on the side of his neck. Bucky was swimming downwards, long hair flowing behind him, like some creature of the deep.

 

“I missed you the most whenever they woke me up. Maybe I was down in cryo for a couple of months, maybe a year. Who knows? My mind repaired itself, I reckon. Not quite enough to string together facts, but – well, I think feelings are harder to erase. They ain’t ever linear, or traceable in your head. I mostly woke up feeling like I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time, because you always were such an insufferable little shit.”

 

Steve leaned in and buried his wet face into the crook of Bucky’s neck. He was squeezing the shit out of him – it would’ve crushed anyone else. But not Bucky, whip-thin and bony but so, so resilient. Of course Bucky would be his match, the only one to withstand his bullshit and deflect his self-righteousness.

 

The closeness was so overwhelming that it took him a minute to realize they were both hard in their pants.

 

“Rosalita’s outside, we can’t,” he half-whispered. “This is her son’s bed.”

 

“When has that ever stopped you, huh? Relax, it’s barely five in the fuckin’ morning,” Bucky was grinning ear to ear when he started grinding up his hips, controlled little movements that sent zings of pleasure up and down his spine. “Stevie, you wanna know what Stark’s A.I. bought me on the Internet?”

 

 

*

 

 

He stroked a hand over the empty socket, afterwards.

 

The sun was rising properly, a gray autumn day in the Bronx. Bucky had fallen asleep again, legs akimbo, his single arm curled around Steve’s waist like he wanted to keep them from drifting apart. The ultra modern vibrator was still covered in slick, powered down on the night stand. He had come with Steve’s hand covering his mouth, muffling the little sounds that spilled out as Steve used the vibrator to stretch his hole open.

 

The sex was so easy, like he had done it a thousand times before. Touching Bucky seemed to be something natural: pleasing him, making him go pink-cheeked and tongue-tied. He had never thought about men before, fucking them, their dicks and shoulders and thighs.

 

Well, now he did.

 

 

*

 

 

He called Donny after four days of laying low at the Hernandez home.

 

It turned out that he was forcedly evicted once S.H.I.E.L.D. stopped paying the rent for Steve’s D.C. apartment after the fall of the Triskelion. He was back to his old routines, selling his stuff on street corners and furthering the anti-capitalist cause with cardboard signs and yelling.

 

“You need to come to New York, Donny,” Steve told him, slipping into their old back and forth with ease. “You gotta meet my best guy from back in the days, come on, I’ll pay for the bus fare.”

 

It turned out that he didn’t have any money, and neither did Bucky. Going to the bank to access his million dollar account would alert Tony Stark and Fury’s people to their whereabouts. Romanoff wasn’t on their side, not this time, so there weren’t any cash filled suitcases to be had, either.

 

In the end, Rosalita paid for the bus. It made Steve burn with a shame that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Having no money made him feel helpless and weak, made him feel 90 pounds soaking wet and asthmatic.

 

“We need to get ourselves some jobs, Rogers.” Bucky told him that night.

 

So that was that.

 

 

*

 

 

Ms. Shanice came to visit every other day, speaking to Rosalita in hushed voices. They hadn’t been fired – yet. But their shifts had been switched to the ground floors, cleaning the lobby area and the spacious conference rooms.

 

“My cousin Bob,” she told Steve, waving her finger at him, “he has this chicken place. They’re looking to hire a dishwasher.”

 

That’s how he found himself with a embarrassingly large Yankee’s base cap on, wearing an over-sized shirt with a musician on it, _Biggy_ , as Miguel had told him. It masked the bulk of his shoulders and the mop of blond hair that had grown back in the few months shut up at the tower. Cousin Bob was a large man with meaty hands, and his eyes grew wide as saucers when they were introduced. It turned out that people weren’t easily fooled by his outfit.

 

Needless to say, he got the job.

 

Bucky had it a tad more difficult. His missing arm excluded him from most manual jobs, even though he promised that he could still lift ten times the amount of any man. The first few weeks he mostly stayed home with the baby Ariana, cooking for Miguel and Francisco when they came home from school. He chatted to the family in fluent Spanish, making the boys giggle and scream with delight, gossiped with the Sanchez auntie from two doors over and had serious conversations about some Zapatista movement with Rosalita. Within days the whole block knew him by name.

 

“It ain’t laying low when you’ve got the whole street runnin’ after you to say hello,” Steve teased him at night, when he’d come back from his dish-washing job. He gave all of his earnings, a crumpled wad of dollar bills from Bob’s wallet, straight to Rosalita, who took it with a fair amount of grumbling.

 

“They are good people,” Bucky was stretched out over Miguel’s bed. He usually came over to Steve’s once they turned off the light, folding himself against his chest. Just thinking about it made his whole body flush in anticipation. “They’re working people, immigrants, like us. You know tía Marta had someone scream at her today? Because she wasn’t speaking English.”

 

“People turned their nose up at my Mam all the time, for that accent.”

 

“What, what’s wrong wit’ te’ accent, aye?”

 

Steve laughed, a full body laugh that reverberated in his chest. It was close to a miracle – he had been prepared to bite through his tongue and die in Stark’s hateful padded cell. He had been prepared to never see Bucky again, to lose him again, after everything. Now he was close, close enough to touch, and Steve couldn’t for the life of him imagine how he had never felt like this before, how he’d spent the first twenty-five years of his life so idle and unconcerned, like Bucky would always be there, indulging him, humming the Solidarity tune.

 

 

*

 

 

A train rattled through his head.

 

How could he have ever been happy? How dare he grab for something that wasn’t his?God had always been unforgiving, and this was his burden to bear. A failure, an arrogant failure, complacent with his new muscles and the flattering attention. A Captain, Captain Rogers, Captain America.

 

Bucky fell, towards the jagged, snowy ground, screaming wordlessly.

 

 _Dear God_ , Steve prayed, _anything, but not him. I understand now. I understand. Not him, let him grow old and have children, he is not at fault. I understand now. It’s not my place to question you. Happiness is not for me._

 

The Winter Soldier’s eyes were warm and smiling, and Steve gave chase. The train whooshed by, and he was torn along with the speed. “Forgive me!” He wanted to say, “Forgive me!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_THE CREEPS_

 

Tony Stark called him at four in the morning.

 

Sam was staying at a Stark-owned hotel in Manhattan, where the windows showed him a million dollar view and the breakfast bar had fresh salmon fillet and a cook who made you French toast with truffle butter. He had called his Momma three times in the last months, pretending to be in D.C., busy with the Veterans Association and the odd counseling job.

 

He was now employed as a recruiter, a crucial part in rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D., as Stark had promised. He had army contacts, spec ops boys who were restless with energy and who had connections further up the chain. It worried him – the rapid militarization, the weapon dealers he shook hands with every other week, the apparent lust for action many of the men harbored.

 

“Listen, my brother, listen – we need you as a, what do they call it? As a reach out person, that’s right! We need you to visit your old friend Rogers and his boyfriend in the Bronx.”

 

“What in God’s name is Steve doing in the Bronx?”

 

“Turns out my tower has larger security concerns than I’d anticipated. It’s unfortunate, yes, I’m working on it. Well, Jarvis is working on it. Kinda hard to keep track of the cleaning ladies, you know?”

 

“He escaped with a cleaning lady?!”

 

“And it currently staying with her entire family. In the Bronx.”

 

“What you got against the Bronx, huh?”

 

Stark hung up on him, mumbling incoherent things. _Rich white people_ , Sam thought viciously to himself, _acting all_ _scandalized way up in their fucking glass towers_.

 

 

*

 

 

Stark had him meet up with Romanoff first thing in the morning, which was an uncomfortable affair, to say the least. She worked from a spacious, nondescript downtown apartment, where she had successfully traced Steve and Barnes with the world’s best surveillance equipment and swiftly established an access plan.

 

It was fucking creepy shit.

 

They spent most of the day talking in half-sentences, going over security footage and reviewing the Hernandez family files. Married, though the husband was apparently absent. The three children were all American citizens, born and bred in New York. The eldest girl had made her way to the West Coast while her daughter, around eighteen months old, resided with the rebellious grandma. Rosalita Hernandez, from a humble Oaxaca farmer’s family, had been cleaning for Stark Industries through a subcontractor since 2008.

 

It filled Sam with discomfort and a strange sort of glee. Because as much as he was working for Stark now, the story of two cleaning ladies leaving with the nation’s most wanted prisoners sparked something inside him. That _something_ reminded him of his Momma, who as a black woman was routinely dismissed and belittled.

 

“Rosalita Hernandez,” he said to Romanoff around noon, “what a lady. I wouldn’t have had the balls to try that – look at her, she walked right in.”

 

Romanoff gave him her standard blank look. Then, like a snake shedding its skin, she smiled, light and airy, a smile that belonged to unburdened school children: “Do you think so? Then maybe you should pay Mrs. Hernandez a visit.”

 

Well. That was creepy as fuck, too.

 

 

*

 

 

He visited Steve’s new job, first.

 

Romanoff had thoroughly briefed him on Robert Price Jr., a black man of middling age who owned a chicken and burger place on 250 Degraw Ave. He felt strange going in, like he was taking off a mask and revealing his own origins in order to make the people there comfortable. Or maybe he was putting on a mask – the mask of that black Harlem boy who had long since faded away.

 

He ordered a box of wings and a coke, eating and scrolling down the Facebook feed on his phone. His eyes flicked towards the kitchen door every so often, and a few times he imaged hearing Steve’s voice, talking to Price, laughing a little.

 

The next time he looked up, Steve was standing right in front of him. He was eating a drumstick, mouth greasy with the juices, wearing a stained apron and a wide T-shirt on which Tupac could be partially seen, posing and smirking into the camera. He looked better, Sam noted, flushed with the kitchen heat, with a bruise on his jawline that looked like a painful love bite.

 

So they had finally reunited properly, him and Barnes.

 

“How d’you do,” Steve said, sliding into the seat opposite from him. He didn’t look overly suspicious, but he didn’t seem overjoyed at his visit, either.

 

“I’m good man, I’m all good. Listen, how are you two holding up?”

 

“We’re doin’ fine, considering we’re not locked up and kept apart anymore,” Steve’s eyebrows had shot up. He finished his chicken, picking the bone clean and snatched himself Sam’s wings, digging in with gusto despite the dark expression on his face. “I’ll say this once. You touch Bucky and I’ll see you to the undertaker.”

 

“Hey, man, we’re good, we’re good – I ain’t touching your boy!” Sam waved his hands around defensively, “Stark wants to parlay with you, that’s it. I’m just the messenger, no use in shooting me.”

 

“You understand, if anyone touches Rosalita and her children, or their neighbors, or their friends in Mexico –“

 

“She wasn’t even fired!”

 

“You touch Ms. Shanice and her family, you’re done –“

 

“– you’re impossible to talk to, man, I’m supposed to be your friend!”

 

Steve frowned for a moment, the he shook his head: “You sold us out. How’s that for being friends?”

 

“I had to do something! You and Barnes, you two were suicidal, you were completely manic – I couldn’t have handled it!”

 

“WELL YOU SHOULD HAVE LET US DIE!”

 

 

*

 

 

There was just the one thing he’d done since Galway that he was proud of.

 

“Who’s there?”

 

He’d held his breath, fearing that words, unfiltered and rough, would tumble from his mouth once he opened it. Jorell the Tall, he still had the same voice, though it sounded tinny and muffled over the bad speakers. There was a fair amount of background noise, honking and chatting and the rush of traffic going by.

 

“Who’s there? Who callin’?”

 

“It’s Sam,” he managed to croak after a few seconds, his voice too high, thin like he’d inhaled helium. “You remember me? I was –“

 

“Samuel. Fucking. Wilson. You callin’ me? You goody-two-shoes sonofabitch callin’ me now? Yo’ college-attending-ass be calling?”

 

Then they were both laughing, and then Sam was crying. That was the part he was proud of – the crying, the hot tears that leaked down his face and made him feel shaky, like the individual parts that made up his person were rattling against one another.

 

“Yeah, I’m calling you, Jorell, you the tall one, righ’? Is that righ’?”

 

“Furreal, my man, that’s right, that’s me!”

 

He’d sat down next to the fancy-ass hotel room mini-bar and downed a few shots – and they talked, finally they talked.

 

 

*

 

 

The Hernandez home reminded him of his own childhood. The rooms were all too small, the furniture crowded together and well-used. Everything was mismatched, not out of fashionable reasons, but practical ones. Barnes and Steve slept in the children’s room while Rosalita shared her bed with her sons. The baby, little Ariana with her big brown eyes, had a her own crib.

 

Barnes had finally gained a smidgen of weight.

 

He was cradling the infant close with his single arm, obviously leaning to the left to compensate for lost weight. Stark had given him a haircut after taking the arm off, though his chin remained stubbly and angular. He gravitated towards Steve once they entered, and their eyes locked in a shared look of weariness.

 

Two boys stuck their heads from the kitchen, where a pot was boiling on the stove. Barnes spoke to them in rapid Spanish, and they disappeared with contrite looks on their little faces. “Miguel and Cisco have homework,” Barnes explained. “It’s a short story they gotta write.”

 

Steve stepped closer to him, and they leaned their heads together with the baby between them. It was such a simple, intimate moment that Sam felt like turning around, giving them some semblance of privacy. He remembered them, curled up together like kittens in that hotel bed, grown men clinging to each other. How Steve had kissed Barnes, desperation and awe all rolled into one huge codependent mess.

 

“He’ll parlay with Stark,” Barnes said after a moment of silence in which only Ariana gurgled and made attempts at talking. “But not today – today we’ve got a friend coming from D.C.”

 

“Listen, they’ve sent me –“

 

“Sam, you know full well that you’ve fucked up.” Steve was breathing heavily again, the anger coming off him in waves. “You think we can’t run? We could jump out that window and disappear right this second. If you catch us, well – we have no fear of death, _as you might’_ _a_ _noticed_. You touch our friends? Well, then we’ll see everything burn.”

 

And it was true. Despite the constant surveillance and the technical possibilities, Stark and Fury couldn’t afford to make a rash move. In the end, what they wanted from Steve was cooperation, his Captain America persona, so reassuring and familiar to the general public. He was the crucial building stone on which the new S.H.I.E.L.D. had to be founded, should it have any credibility at all. Barnes, well – Barnes was a different case altogether. First and foremost, he was leverage, someone precious to keep Steve in line.

 

Now it had all gone down the drain.

 

“You can contact me, y’know, once you’ve made up your mind on talking to Stark, or Fury, or anyone. Is that okay?”

 

“I’ll let you know,” Steve said, his eyes fixed on Barnes, who was cooing into the baby’s soft black hair. He looked like he might go off any second, tensed with pent up energy, like he wanted to tie Barnes up, or preferably to himself, lest he ever decided he should disappear again.

 

Sam left with that image in his mind’s eye.

 

 

*

 

 

He ended up at Romanoff’s bleak apartment, having vodka with her, watching the security feed of the Hernandez apartment. The drone was almost completely silent as it hovered outside the kitchen window, where dinner was ongoing.

 

Donald G. Lerner, Steve’s homeless friend from D.C. had arrived. His huge backpack was parked in the living room and he was showing the children tricks with a few dirty toothpicks. Afterwards, the adults crowded onto the narrow balcony and smoked five blunts in succession. It was almost a familiar sight – Steve rolling up, pursing his lips for a first tug and passing it on to the next person. His arm was lazily slung over Barnes’ shoulders, keeping him close.

 

Sam could tell that Barnes had already spotted the drone, advanced as it was, but he didn’t make a move to reveal the information to the others. Lerner was talking animatedly, making broad gestures with his hands, pack of tobacco always at the ready under his armpit. Rosalita Hernandez seemed downright happy with her unusual guests, leaning on the railing with smoke gushing out her nose, eyes half-lid with a smile.

 

Romanoff reported the drug use with a few code words.

 

“It’s just weed, lady,” Sam told her, amused. “Everyone does weed.” She shrugged her shoulders in a fluid motion, eyes impassive: “Barnes has further drug habits. You should have noticed, traveling with them.”

 

“I’d be doing drugs left and right, too, if I were him.”

 

“I wouldn’t. I’m not.”

 

They both took a new shot of vodka, the smooth, burning glide making Sam lightheaded and sleepy, all at the same time. He thought of his momma, the songs she hummed while she cooked dinner. He though about the joints he’d smoked as a teenager, and the weed that had gotten Jorell locked up. The black kids, all locked up, kicking walls, screaming with anger and self-hatred.

 

He fell asleep on Romanoff’s couch. The last thing he noticed was her watching him closely while he drifted off, face a blank slate, just taking in, revealing nothing. Strangely enough, that didn’t feel creepy at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_CAP_

 

The lights are dimmed while a sonorous voice announces the guest of the evening and following the directions of a flashcard the spectators break into an enthusiastic applause. They are all smiling, and some stand to wave their hands above their heads. A few hoot and scream out things.

 

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” The talk show host yells, spreading his arms wide open in a welcoming gesture. “THIS IS SPECIAL! TRULY SPECIAL!”

 

They don’t let him finish his prepared introduction, screaming and shouting, clapping rhythmically while the lights flare up bright and golden. A cue is given, and Captain America steps out onto the made-up stage. He is wearing a tailored suit that snugly covers his broad shoulders and the tapered waistline. Catcalls and jovial laughter can be heard among the audience.

 

“I BELIEVE I DON’T HAVE TO MAKE ANY INTRODUCTIONS AT ALL! WHO DOESN’T KNOW HIM? THE ICON OF OUR GREAT NATION!” The host bellows, grinning with his mouth wide open.

 

The applause continues on while Captain America inclines his head in thanks, waiting with his hands held stiffly at his sides. He has pale blond hair, combed back, and his face is impeccable with makeup and a light dusting of powder. The smile he gives is almost pained.

 

“PLEASE, PLEASE!” The host says to the audience, grinning, “Let the man sit down, our best guy, America’s best – you gotta let the man sit down!”

 

Finally, the noise dies down. Captain America takes a seat on the guest’s couch, sitting up straight as a board: “Thank you for having me, Mr. Kimmel. It is truly an honor.”

 

“Steve, Steve, you gotta call me Jimmy – call me Jimmy, or actually, call me whatever you want! I don’t mind!” The audience laughs appreciatively, craning their heads to see better. The host winks at the frontal camera, making a playful face with his brows raised.

 

“Thank you, Jimmy, it’s my pleasure.”

 

“Now, now, Steve – tell me, it’s been a busy few months for you, is that right?”

 

“That’s correct, Jimmy, a busy few years, more like.” The audience chuckles at that, a few people clapping.

 

“How so, how so? We’ve all been very… curious! The leaked files, the fall of the Triskelion, your disappearance – I mean, you could’ve just told us if you wanted a break from the screaming fans, right?”

 

More laughter, while a woman’s voice yells out: “I WANT YOUR BABIES CAP!” The host claps and laughs at that, pointing into the audience, winking again: “I see you’re getting offers, Captain.”

 

“Ah, Jimmy, a lot has happened.” Captain America deflects, giving a forced smile. “It’s not always easy to summarize that for other people to understand.”

 

“Of course, of course!”

 

“I’m here to tell everyone what happened. And what we’re trying to do. That’s me, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff. A few other people might join in, as well.”

 

“Tony Stark, who’s that again?” The host mimes a clueless head-scratch while the audience indulges him and roars with more laughter. “That is amazing – I’m sure many people will be very glad to know Iron Man and our Cap here are working together again.”

 

“Yes,” Captain America says, and this time his voice his grave. Immediately the host tamps down his antics and sits up a little straighter. “It’s a very important task, Jimmy. We need to rebuild S.H.I.E.L.D. from the ground up – in order to guarantee our nation’s security and peace.”

 

The audience remains silent for a long second. Then a tumultuous, thunderous applause starts up and refuses the die down for half a minute. The cue card reading “ _Cheer!_ ” is held up to the spectators and waved around. Captain America accepts the standing ovations, rising to his impressive height. His face is a wooden mask and his eyes seem to be trained to a fair point along the darkened walls.

 

“CAPTAIN AMERICA, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! STEVE ROGERS!” The host intones, gesturing wildly and joining in to the cheering voices. Captain America does a half-hearted bow, his hands clenched into fists, the knuckles going white with force.

 

“Now, Steve, we’re all really curious: how do you actually find the 21st century?” The host gestures around the sleek studio, the plush old fashioned armchairs that match the stage props, which are supposed to recreate a 1940s flair with rolled up newspaper and artfully worn out rugs. “We know you said you liked the ‘modern television set’!”

 

The audience laughs again, charmed by the outdated expression.

 

“Well, Jimmy,” Captain America clears his throat a few times. His hands are clenching and unclenching in his lap. There is sweat visible, darkening his hair at the temples. “You want my honest answer? I wasn’t doing so good.”

 

“Oh, yes, of course!” The host clasps his hand together, expression growing concerned. “It must’ve been so disorienting, waking up, knowing nobody...” The audience falls silent, a hush going over the studio. Only the camera director is still giving out commands, zooming in on the Captain’s sour expression.

 

“I had nobody, and knew nothing. To be real honest with you, I had no interest in anything, either. It all seemed like… some dream, and I was gonna wake up and find myself bleeding to death in the war, or dying of asthma, something like that.”

 

The camera cuts to the faces of a few crying women in the audience, an older man that is valiantly holding back his tears. The host lowers his head, as if in grief, and lets out an audible breath: “That. That’s so much to go through, Steve. You are a brave man. The bravest! To still come back and serve our country, after seventy years!”

 

Thunderous clapping, again. This time people stand up and start chanting: “CAP! CAP! CAP! CAP!” They don’t stop for close to five minutes, a deafening roar that is picked up and doubled in volume by the sound engineer.

 

Captain America has gone very pale beneath his TV makeup, his shoulders hunched over with tension. He lets the cheering wash over him, and then sits obediently when the host indicates him to take a seat. He clears his throat again, speaking up to be heard over the noise: “You know I died, Jimmy.”

 

The host exchanges looks with the creative director, but rolls with it and nods his head empathetically: “You were in the ice, we know, we all saw you when you were taken out! It was all over the news, let me tell ya’!”

 

“No, I died before that.” Captain America is looking down, at his twitching hands. “There was a little guy, with bad eyes and a weak spine. That used to be me. Uh, he was good for nothing. He wasn’t ever gonna get married, or have kids, or fight for anything. Everyone was glad to see him go, nobody mourned him –“

 

“Steve, could you tell us about –” the host says gently, glancing towards his staff behind the numerous cameras. But Captain America keeps talking, eyes still downcast, not looking at anyone: “Truth is, I’ve learned all my life that this is what I had to be like. I mean, to be worth a damn. Weak folks, sick folks, folks who can’t speak proper, who can’t work and provide for themselves, they don’t deserve to live. That’s somethin’ this country has taught me.”

 

Everyone is quiet now, frowning, disgruntled with the sudden change.

 

“I had to become this,” Captain America gestures up and down his physique, and his hands are shaking, “I had to become _this_ to deserve a place in our society.”

 

More silence.

 

“That’s part of the reason why I believed in communism. Why I still do. Because I think every person should be equally valued, and have the same right to get food on their table, even if they are poor, or sick, or a woman, or not the right skin color.”

 

The host is now ashy around his nose, and the studio staff is scrambling to edit the live stream. They aren’t very successful – live performances and interviews are usually scripted, only done with reasonably sensible celebrities. The evening show was repeatedly promised that Captain America was a trained entertainer, a viewer magnet, full of good old fashioned charm.

 

“I was brought back, alright, but mostly I just wanted to die, properly this time. So I could see my Mam, and maybe meet my father, and Bucky,” Captain America is choking on his words now. The whole room sits in stunned silence. Then the host gives a signal and the prime time live show is terminated, jumping to an expensive car advertisement that had paid plenty for the time slot.

 

The host gives Captain America an embarrassed glance, and gets up, muttering to himself. The audience is becoming restless, and security personnel files in to clear out the premises as quickly as possible. Many have now taken out their phones, filming the dejected Captain, greedily zooming in on his stony expression.

 

The main lights flicker out, and the staff busies itself with the post-filming routine. The host leaves for his changing rooms, not bothering with goodbyes. He is visibly furious with the outcome of his promising show. Captain America slowly rises and follows behind.

 

Once he leaves the voices explode, and everyone is engaged in animated chatter. _#capsacommie_ is trending on twitter, flooding the Internet with vicious commentary. _#notmycaptain_ many write, angered with his blatant, uncompromising display. They wanted a sweet, smiling, gorgeous blond soldier from the 1940, an exotic time, a time when America had been truly great, had won the war and righteously so. They wanted to chat about his favorite type of gal and his morning workout, wanted him to maybe take off his shirt and flash some muscle.

 

His impromptu speech is an affront to their sensibilities.

 

The studio lights go out while the streets of New York bustle with energy, with people passing by. Captain America gets into a limousine and is driven back to the Bronx, where he is on time for the late shift at Bob’s chicken place, doing dishes, clearing out the garbage.

 

He smiles while he works. Occasionally some makeup is wiped off on the crumpled sleeve of his expensive dress shirt.


	9. Body Parts, or: Endless, Mindless Cravings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is filled with porn, beware.

_FUCKING (i)_

 

Sex with Bucky was mind blowing.

 

It sounded downright cliché, but before, he had been either chronically ill, stuck in the European part of the II World War or crippled with depression. There hadn’t been a lot of time to do the deed, even though he did try it with quite a few of the chorus girls, some willing army nurses and bold 21st century fans. It was mostly a lot of fumbling around to quell his embarrassingly persistent urges that had surfaced with his serum induced transformation.

 

Now he came home at a set time, crawled into bed and slid his arm around Bucky, who was either reading one of Rosalita’s books or surfing the Internet on the family computer. He usually kissed a trace up his nape and nuzzled his nose along his cheekbone, which resulted in a make-out session with heavy petting, hard dicks and a lot of lube. Lots of it.

 

Bucky loved getting fucked up the ass.

 

It was a simple fact which had, at first, sent Steve into a downward spiral between arousal and desperate denial. Now he practically indulged himself, slicking Bucky up with his fingers and flicking his sweet spot until he wailed. He loved pushing inside steady and slow, watching Bucky flush pink and go glassy eyed with pleasure.

 

He ate him out for the first time three weeks after arriving at the Hernandez home, putting his agile tongue and inhuman breathing control to good use. Bucky had tried his damnedest to stay quiet, but he had practically screamed when Steve used his fingers and his tongue simultaneously.

 

Bucky blew his mind by finding new things to try and do every other day. And Steve? He found himself wanting all of those things, wanting to pull Bucky closer, stay inside him so he could feel his rocketing pulse through the aching place they were joined. Waking up in this new century had made him reckless – even more so than before. And it showed in bed, too.

 

 

*

 

 

Rosalita pulled him aside and asked him about the living situation in mid-November. “Steve, I like you guys, the children like you – Pelo, he’s a great _tío_ to Ari. But you people obviously need your own place, no?”

 

He had the grace to blush at that, but he knew she was right. It was comfortable to stay with her, and he loved the shabby, run-down little apartment. Bucky had formed a bond with the kids, that much was obvious. But Donny was here now, camping out in the living room, sitting on the crowded balcony with his endless cigarettes.

 

He went to the bank where his account was the following day and made a deposit to Rosalita with the help of a clerk who secretly filmed him with her phone. She received half of the millions that he’d gotten in payback. Then he sent two-thirds of what was left to Shanice. The rest he took out in cash, which was apparently not something people did these days.

 

Then he called Tony Stark, because he had gone on the TV show and spoken about the new S.H.I.E.L.D., which meant that he owed him nothing: “I want to rent an apartment in the Bronx,” he told him without a greeting.

 

“Cap, so nice of you to call, I missed you too. And how about this: You can come live at my tower, for free.”

 

Steve remained silent at that.

 

“Okay, that was insensitive, seeing as I’ve only just kept you and your boyfriend prisoner due to strategic reasons, woopsy daisy! How’s this: you can have a life-long stay at any Stark-owned hotel of your choice!”

 

“Tony, can you just ask your A.I. to get us an apartment near our current living place?” It gave him a sort of perverse pleasure to rile Stark up, knowing that his luxury apartments with their thousand dollar silk beddings were being eschewed for grimy brownstones with no proper heating.

 

“Fine, fine, okay, have it your way. That’s what you call me for? To _use_ Jarvis like some, some servant?”

 

Steve hung up on him, smiling.

 

 

*

 

 

They moved into a low-income public housing project in Soundview, which was probably meant as a huge “Fuck You” from Stark, but turned out to be just perfect. They had two bedrooms and no furniture whatsoever, so Bucky went ahead and brought back two mattresses with the help of a couple teenagers who also sold them weed.

 

Donny got the larger room, because he needed space to spread out all the stuff he had accumulated over the years. Steve and Bucky had pretty much nothing, so they shared a bed and all their new hip hop T-shirts.

 

That night, they had sex with Bucky on all fours while Steve forgot to hold back and reamed him from behind, biting the horrible scarring along his empty socket and leaving finger-shaped bruises on his thighs. His hole felt puffy, making lewd squelching noises whenever Steve pushed in at a certain angle, and his mouth was hanging open with blissful ignorance of the world in general.

 

“You want the dildo in your mouth?” Steve didn’t know where the idea came from, but his dick jerked a little with the mental image. He felt flushed and overwhelmed, Bucky’s channel tightening around him in pulses.

 

“Yeah, _Stevie_ , do it,” Bucky opened his mouth wide, lips swollen and red, jaw slackened while Steve fumbled for the fake rubber dick. It was one of the few things the had actually brought from Rosalita’s place. Bucky took the dildo between his lips, suckling like it was the real deal. He was still speared on Steve’s dick, his hips making little gyrating movements while he swallowed more and more of the rubber dildo, choking a little, his lips shiny with spit and tears.

 

“God, look at you,” Steve told him, and he once again felt like a stupid kid, getting his dick wet for the first time. He hadn’t ever considered this possible, before. “I wanna fuck you against the wall, how’s that? Or in our new shower.”

 

Bucky choked on the dildo, slowly removing it from his throat. He was laughing, a throaty sound: “Our shower is fucking disgusting, have you seen it?”

 

“I would still do you if we were nine months unwashed, deep in the French Alps.”

 

“Little Stevie Rogers, you gonna fight the Nazis for me? Gonna save me?” Bucky was looking at him with hooded eyes, his back a sinuous curve, arched to accommodate the thrusting with his legs spread wide open. His single arm supported the weight without any complaint, corded muscles visible.

 

“Very funny,” Steve grumbled. Then his voice gave out, because Bucky had taken the initiative, moving with languor, fucking himself back on Steve’s cock. He was helpless, to a certain degree – his one arm occupied, the other contained in Stark’s lab. He couldn’t touch himself, couldn’t reach for the dildo.

 

“I want it in my mouth,” he panted, and Steve could only oblige him. That was his new favorite image: Bucky on his knees, sucking on a rubber dick, legs spread obscenely wide, hole stretched around the girth of his cock. He screamed himself hoarse while he came and Steve fucked him right through it, faithful friend that he was.

 

Donny banged on the thin wall separating their rooms afterwards, going: “Congrats on that!”

 

 

*

 

 

He woke up to find Bucky gone on a cold December morning.

 

He searched the apartment, asked Donny several times before stumbling out onto the streets with his heart beating in his throat. He didn’t even notice the light dusting of snow until he had gone back to the apartment two and a half hours later. He had forgotten to put on shoes, and his feet had gone bloodless and cold even with all the headless running he’d been doing.

 

“What the fuck is wrong with you, buddy,” Donny asked while forcing him under the shower. “Your boy could’ve literally gone anywhere! Maybe he went job hunting, God knows I have.”

 

They rolled up a joint on the balcony and blew smoke towards the graying sky. Steve’s stomach was in tangles, with no amount of weed doing the trick of calming him down. Donny left after some time, to go explore the sites, as he liked to say. He was always much more comfortable spending his time on the street than cooped up inside. Steve stayed in the cold of their dingy balcony, and his eyebrows were covered with hoarfrost when he went back inside. He felt like someone had lodged a knife inside his guts and twisted it left and right, for good measure.

 

He climbed back into bed, knowing that he had to start over with the search, that he had to ask for Romanoff’s help, that his chest felt like a giant, blackening bruise. When he woke up, bleary and disoriented, Bucky was smack in the middle of their small kitchen, kneeling in front of a bicycle which was flipped over with two flat tires.

 

Steve didn’t think – he just acted. With no time to lose, he tucked Bucky up and crashed him up against the nearest wall. Anger was bubbling up inside him, and he was somehow humiliated, the tips of his ears burning with it: “Where in God’s name did you go? I _looked_ for you, you fucking punk!”

 

“I got a special offer,” Bucky said, eyebrows rising. He was looking up at Steve, his eyes wide and dark, and before either of them could say anything further they were kissing like their lives depended on it. “ _Oh_ – Stevie, I bought us a bike, how’s that?”

 

“What did you pay with? We have _no money_ for that!” It was strangely reminiscent of their early years, living together without two pennies to rub together. Only that now he had voluntarily given away most of his previous wealth. Bucky just shrugged, his eyes cast downwards, mouth a straight line. “Buck, tell me.”

 

“I could apply for a messenger job, you know,” his lips looked bitten, like someone had tucked on them with his teeth. “With the bike, that’s something I could do.”

 

“How. Did. You. Pay.”

 

And before he could further control himself, his hands were already tucking down the pants Bucky was wearing, slipping past the elastic band of his underwear and sliding down the familiar warmth of his tail bone, to his sensitive hole. It was slick and puffy to the feel, loosened enough for two fingers to slide in at once, even while standing up.

 

“Why?” Steve croaked, unable to find his voice. He wanted to murder the person who had sold Bucky the bike. “I told you, we can access my bank account now… I’ve done my part with Stark. _Why_ would you do it?”

 

Bucky keened into his shoulder, hips rolling back and forth, clearly liking the sudden intrusion inside his body: “I wanted – I wanted something – all of my own, _ah_ , Steve!” He shuddered, grinding against Steve’s thigh, dick hard and leaking. He made little, by now familiar noises whenever the magic spot inside him was grazed, however slightly.

 

Steve felt choked up with anger, and something that he fleetingly identified as bitter jealousy. He turned Bucky around, opening the fly of his own jeans single handed, and pushed in without a word of warning. Bucky keened, throwing his head back while Steve held his arm twisted behind his back, hips pounding in an unrelenting rhythm.

 

Who was the man? Who had touched Bucky? In his mind he saw Bucky during their trip in Europe, getting fingered in dark alleys, giving head on his knees. It made him delirious with anger – they had come this far, how dare he? This was the single thing that had felt good in a long, long time.

 

They crumbled to the floor after the first orgasm, and Bucky sat astride him and rode him slowly, slowly until they both came a second time.

 

 

*

 

 

“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” Bucky told him afterwards, when they were back on their bare mattress, close to dozing after the vigorous fucking. “But it’s been going through my mind a lot – why not make money out of it?”

 

“Buck, please. Don’t.” The idea of Bucky prostituting himself was deeply disturbing. Like he himself had somehow failed, failed to provide something crucial. He wanted Bucky to himself, that much was clear. Everything else made him want to throw up his breakfast.

 

“I know! That’s why I got the bike, I thought it would be better! I fucked the guy who owned the shop, alright? He’s a friend of Marta’s. He flirted with me a lot when we were living at Rosa’s.”

 

Steve swallowed at that. Something inside him had gone cold, something that treasured everything Bucky-related beyond all else, that longed to hold him close and bite him for good measure. “Did you enjoy it?”

 

“It’s sex, Steve! I like sex – I considered it because I’ve done it before!”

 

Steve got up and left after that outburst. This time he did put on his shoes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_FUCKING (ii)_

 

The winter of 1938 was a bitter one.

 

Bucky had only moved in with Steve for three months when the lease ran out. They scrambled to make the rent, but it was too late. October saw them evicted, out on the streets with Sarah Rogers’ cheap furniture and a few boxes of clothes. It wasn’t anything new – growing up, he remembered whole families standing on the muddy streets, old and young alike, bundled up with misery etched across their faces. It was a routine occurrence.

 

By that time they had both joined the Council for the Unemployed, picketing against forced evictions and struggling to provide direct aid. Still, being out on the streets felt like defeat, like bloody rock bottom.

 

Steve was sick, he always was. They gifted away most of the furniture and managed to sleep in the Barnes’ kitchen for two months, until January, when Becca’s new child was born and the apartment became overcrowded, fifteen people living in three rooms. Bucky spent the days prowling the streets, scanning the floor for lost pennies, sticking his head into stores, asking for odd jobs.

 

He talked to the homeless in their shanty lodgings, and he burned with a deep hatred at the world, the cruelty and poverty. In February he gave away his best overcoat to a gnarly old man, drunk on the streets with frost-bite eating away the tip of his nose. Steve was furious – they were queuing at the soup kitchen, shuffling on their feet against the cold.

 

“You fucking idiot! You become immune to the weather, or something? Why’d you do it, huh? You wanna die?” Steve had grown embittered since his Mam died, frowning more often than not. He claimed to have no appetite, but Bucky had forced him to come.

 

“He needed it more, Rogers. I’m doing fine, I’ve been up all day.”

 

“Your bloody lips are blue, you complete – complete,” Steve was breathing heavily, wheezing and coughing. He had blueish shadows under his eyes, and he had taken off a few pounds throughout the winter. Bucky had become haggard, sharp-boned, as well – they all had. But with Steve it scared him more. Like he could fall over any minute, die from hard breathing or a seizure, something like that.

 

They spent a few weeks hopping between shelters and the kitchen floors of friends and comrades. Steve never slept well on hard surfaces, he usually needed a pile of downy pillows to support his twisted back, help his breathing. On one of those nights he had an asthma attack so severe his face turned greenish and blotchy. He spent the hours before dawn retching out the soup Bucky had forced down his stomach and finally lost consciousness around breakfast time.

 

That was the last straw.

 

 

*

 

 

It was as if Bucky had always known the solution to their problem.

 

He walked around the neighborhood, as he did everyday, greeting folks on the street left and right. His hands felt clammy with cold sweat and his heart threatened to beat straight out of his chest. He knew it was outlawed, that there were police officers waiting to arrest him if he gave them even an inkling of doubt.

 

He made his way along the waterfront, glancing around with uncertain eyes, balled fists stuffed deep into the pockets of his trousers. People were milling around despite the dreadful cold, exchanging news, talking, sharing cigarettes. Brooklyn seemed especially dreary to him on these gray mornings, a place that never brightened up, a place clogged with filth and refuse.

He immediately scolded himself for theses thoughts. This was his home – for what it was worth, he knew no other place, had never laid eyes on any other town but this one.

 

It turned out not being very difficult at all.

 

Bucky wasn’t the only jobless youth searching for another source of income. He haggled a price of three dollars for twenty minutes of his company and immediately found a patron, a portly, older gentleman who took him driving in his sleek automobile until they found a quiet spot to do business.

 

He’d sucked cock before, though his experience wasn’t very extensive. There was a burning behind his eyes, the acrid taste of humiliation that lingered in his mouth after he’d swallowed. He used petroleum to slick himself up, making a show out of it, hoping to lengthen the client’s time to forty minutes.

 

It worked. He used four of the six dollars to pay for one night at a humble hotel and gave the rest to Paddy O’Malley and his wife Bess, whom they had been staying with for close to a week. There was still enough left to buy some bread a bottle of Bushmills to ward off the freezing wind.

 

Steve was still out of it, pale as a ghost, lacking any fight. Even when Bucky carried him bridal style, all the way to their temporary abode.

 

 

*

 

 

He did it a few more times that spring, fucking strange men in their cars against payment. He took care to always have condoms on his person, and unwittingly developed quite the reputation as a lady magnet amongst his pals. Along the waterfront, however, clients knew him as the lusty lad who always reached his peak during a good ass-fucking.

 

It was true, he usually found pleasure with the men, even more so when they made him suck their cocks and fingers, treating him like they would a two-dime whore. There was a spot inside him that set him off like nothing else, and he quickly discovered that only cocks of a certain length and thickness could properly reach it.

 

He should have felt endlessly ashamed, and in a way, he certainly was. Steve remained none the wiser, even after he got a job at the docks through favors and blowjobs given freely and enthusiastically. The moved into another flat at the end of March, moldy and run-down with a layer of dust that simply couldn’t be cleared away.

 

But it was better than nothing.

 

 

*

 

 

His first client, the portly man who always asked to be called Mr. Smith, came back a few times. He took Bucky out drinking at the other end of town and fucked him into unbearably soft mattresses while swearing and choking the air from his lungs. He also liked to recline on the cushions, watching Bucky impale himself on his stout cock.

 

“Tell me how it is,” he would request, and Bucky would groan out loud without even an ounce of deception to his voice. “It’s so good, Mister, your cock stretches me so good.” “You are a natural, you little whore,” he would whisper while their bodies smacked together noisily with frantic movements.

 

Those were some of the best orgasms Bucky ever had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_FUCKING (iii)_

 

Steve came back that night soaked to the bone and angry at the world.

 

He’d gone to the bar after work and downed three bottles of rum without feeling even the slightest bit drunk. A woman had flirted with him throughout the evening, showing him pictures of a yappy little dog on her phone and laughing in a shrill voice. He briefly thought about going home with her and eating her out. But it would have been forced, done out of spite with his head filled with Bucky.

 

Bucky wasn’t home when he came in, and neither was the hated bicycle he had obtained by letting some other man fuck him. Donny had cooked a thick, creamy carrot soup in a pot he had stolen at Target and was eating it sitting down on one of two rickety plastic chairs the neighbors had thrown out.

 

“Cap, how is it?” he asked, smacking his lips and slurping noisily. “Solved your problems with the missus?”

 

“Har har,” Steve said. Then he got the whole pot and a spoon and finished everything within five minutes. “Good soup, why’re you always cooking soup anyways, Donny?”

 

“Soup kitchens all over the country, you understand. I developed a taste for it, Cap, it’s affordable, it’s easy on your teeth – what more could’ya want in life?”

 

They ate five packages of potato chips after the soup, while Donny rolled up six smokes, three for each of them. It was an easy companionship, something that did not make him seize up with different emotions every other hour. For a brief second, he wished that Bucky would never come back, that he would stay with the bicycle guy, so Steve wouldn’t ever feel this hurt again.

 

Of course, that thought was quickly discarded and replaced by a wave of choking concern, an urge to run out and drag Bucky back home immediately. He smoked a couple blunts, chasing the short-lived, blurry highs every drag gave him.

 

He must’ve fallen asleep, because Donny was gone and rummaging could be heard from his room. Bucky was leaning over him, flushed and sweaty from exertion. His face looked softer in the dimmed light, not as gaunt, younger, like the old Bucky before everything. Steve reached up, his stomach flipping with anxiety, and dragged his face closer until they were kissing, noses mashing together painfully.

 

“I’m really good at bike riding,” Bucky whispered against his lips, “Even without the arm.”

 

Steve stiffened despite his painfully hard erection. The remained silent for a minute, then Bucky sighed and sat up, leaving a meter of cold space between them. “You know, it’s something they never touched. I wasn’t fully human, to them. Weapons don’t have urges, or anything like that. Stark wanted to make me talk to a head doctor, but I can tell you this without any shrink – I always used to like sex, but now it’s something else. It’s so fuckin’ good because they never touched me like that.”

 

Maybe it was selfish, to distract from a serious confession like this one, but Steve couldn’t hold it in: “Am I not enough, Buck?”

 

They were huddling closer again, and Steve reached out to run his palm up and down Bucky’s spine, tweaking his nipples through the fabric of their shared Tupac shirt, squeezing his firm buttocks. Their mouths found each other again, pecking and biting, tongues tangling together until a string of saliva connected their lips.

 

“What do you mean, enough,” Bucky was breathing heavily. He arranged himself on Steve’s lap with the easy grace of a cat, grinding his ass down with rolling movements. “I thought that was part of what we always wanted – free love, natural love, doing what feels good.”

 

Steve couldn’t think straight. Bucky was all over him, warm skin and corded muscles, long legs wrapping around his waist while he held himself up on his single arm: “I want to be enough for you,” he managed to say, and cringed at how wobbly his voice sounded. Like he was about to burst into tears.

 

“Stevie,” Bucky said quietly, “I know now. I won’t do it again if you feel this bad.”

 

“But you want to,” he choked up, and now he was crying for real. Part of him longed to be put back into the ice, where he couldn’t feel a damn thing. Another part wanted to strangle Bucky, for doing this to him. For coming back and existing and thoroughly filling his life. There was also the familiar part that wanted to evade all kinds of pain by simply jumping off Brooklyn bridge.

 

“Yeah, I do. I think… I think we’re really different in that area,” they were still rocking together, white hot pangs of pleasure traveling up Steve’s spine. “But I won’t do it, alright? Because of you.”

 

“That’s not right,” Steve moaned, burying his face into the sweaty crook of Bucky’s neck, “you should be able to do whatever you want, Buck. _Especially_ you.”

 

Bucky was getting up, kicking his way out of his clothes. He fumbled Steve’s fly open and viciously squeezed at the half-empty bottle of slick: “Open me up, Stevie, c’mon, do it.” Steve obliged with shaking hands, getting lubricant all over their mattress while his fingers slid up and down Bucky’s taint, grazing his balls before pushing into his hole. His insides were hot and silky, sucking and tightening rhythmically.

 

“Stevie, _aah_ ,” Bucky was trembling, “wish I didn’t need all this prep. You could just slide home, how great would that be?”

 

“Shaddup, jerk, you love the prep.” They both laughed at that, and then Steve was fisting his cock with the residue of slick and pulling Bucky down with a forceful tug. His dick slid past its goal, the friction making both of them groan. It took another try or two until he was seated deep inside Bucky’s channel, shaking with the effort of not moving too quickly. Bucky started lifting himself up, arm braced against the wall separating them from Donny, before slamming down with added force.

 

Steve looked up, feeling the same wave of disbelieve that always came, because there was Bucky Barnes, his best friend since always, the most popular guy with the dames, bouncing on his cock with his mouth open and his eyes half-lidded. He felt an itch at the base of his spine and sat up, a sudden movement that sent Bucky toppling down. They tumbled over each other for a few seconds before Steve won and pressed him back into their single blanket, pushing his legs up as far as they went.

 

He fucked inside again with his elbows placed left and right of Bucky’s face, locking eyes with him, hips working like pistons. “I want to murder the bastard in his sleep,” he growled, anger and embarrassment mixing in his chest. “I want to bash his head in.”

 

“Fuck,” Bucky was staring up at him, eyes glazed over with lust while he was jostled back and forth with the force of the thrusts, “that’s not healthy, Stevie.”

 

“Nothing. About. This.” Steve spit out through gritted teeth. He meant to finish his sentence, but Bucky was growing tight around his cock, hand clawing at his right shoulder, grabbing at his pectoral and scratching along his nipple with blunt fingernails. Then he was tensing, eyes squeezing shut while he let out a hoarse moan, shorter hair fanned out and stringy with sweat.

 

“Fuck,” he shouted, white ropes of semen covering both their stomachs, “ _Ah, fuck_!”

 

Steve remained inside him, still hard, his pulse skyrocketing while he watched Bucky Barnes shake apart.

 

“Don’t kill Juan Carlos, please.” Bucky said after a few minutes of silence, filled with his gasping breaths. It sent a bitter pang of jealousy crashing through his chest, hearing the name of someone Bucky had been close with. He apparently wasn’t a very good sport when it came to these things.

 

He started up with his movements, reaching down and jerking at Bucky’s spent cock while he fucked inside him again, feeling dizzy with the sensations, the tightness, the searing heat, the little pained noises Bucky made whenever his favorite spot was touched, overstimulated but clearly still loving it. Tears were running down the side of his face, and Steve knew that he had never seen anything more beautiful.

 

“Deeper,” Bucky demanded, voice utterly wrecked, throwing his head back and exposing the long, pale line of his throat, “I said deeper, Rogers!”

 

Steve obeyed, pressing his hips down with brute force, jolting both of them until they almost banged against the nearest wall. Bucky screamed, his single hand tearing a long, bloody scratch down Steve’s back. He reached another peak with a wrecking violence, his come splattering all the way up to Steve’s forehead while his legs locked around his waist like vices.

 

“ _Steve_ ,” he said, again and again, teary eyes unseeing and disoriented. Like a prayer, he went: “Stevie, my Stevie.”

 

And that was enough to make him come, too.

 

 

*

 

 

“Living on this goddamned earth is a huge compromise,” Bucky told him the next day after waking up around noon, “You don’t need to tell me again, but I sure do love you, you punk. If you want me to keep it in my pants, I can do that for you.”

 

Steve only pulled him closer, reveling in the warmth of his scarred skin. He didn’t miss his early mornings, the mindless runs, the many hours he had spent closing himself off. Neither did he truly miss the rattling in his breath, the cold air seeping through rickety windows or Bucky twisting his hand lifting crates.

 

“This is the happiest I’ve ever been,” he told Bucky after a few moments of breathing, “I know you can’t ever measure that, but that’s how I feel right now.”

 

“Alright, that’s up to you,” Bucky bit at his ear, smiling: “You know, I went through the files Natalia leaked the other day – I was shipped over to Camden a year before the end of the Cold War.”

 

“It’s so strange they call it that, considering all the people that’d died,” Steve mumbled, frowning against the back of Bucky’s head.

 

“Yeah, I know – but let me show you,” he got up and rummaged through the single old sports bag that used to belong to Miguel. He pulled out a laptop, the old, chunky one from the Hernandez home, an angry gift from Rosalita after she had checked her balance and found a couple million dollars more than before residing on her bank account.

 

Bucky clicked back and forth expertly, typing things into a black window on the screen. A video started to play in awful, scraggly quality. Steve knew the room – he had personally seen it destroyed on the first of many stops, searching for Bucky. The chair was placed against a white backdrop, and the Winter Soldier sat in it, slumped over with tangled hair covering most of his face.

 

A beeping noise arose, and the soldier was shown something, a picture.

 

The woman in the white robe retreated, waiting for a reaction. The Soldier remained silent for a long time, barely moving at all. Then he started singing, off-key, with the mouth piece still wedged between his teeth, but Steve could make out the words with clarity.

 

_Solidarity forever,_  
Solidarity forever,  
Solidarity forever,  
For the union makes us strong.

 

They let him sing for a moment before the scientist in her lab coat stepped to the front and started reprogramming the chair. Steve felt bile rising in his throat, a scream lodged inside him, making it hard to breathe. Before he could react at all, Bucky had already stopped the video from playing any further.

 

“You see that, punk?” He was held close, their noses touching at the tip, breath mingling together. Steve felt like he was about to burst into a million pieces, made up of the many seconds, minutes and hours that had passed by while he was in the ice. While Bucky suffered and remembered, despite everything.

 

“Never mind the rest, never mind it – just know, that was me remembering you,” Bucky was kissing him again, lips firm, eyelashes tickling his cheekbones. Feeling his smile, warm and sure.

 

“Thank God,” he whispered wetly, wiping at both their faces to clear away tear tracks, imagined and real. Bucky laughed, low and throaty, a sound that struck him like a hammer taken to an anvil.

 

“Stevie Rogers, still the worst communist on the block.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/157989795@N05/36469069572/in/dateposted-public/)


	10. Things Left Behind, or: All the Strange Beginnings

There might be the possibility that they had gone and died.   
  
In the dull morning light, painted with shadows and drowned in Whiskey, that is what Tony Stark will tell you, sitting between his gadgets and his wealth, his head heavy and his eyes tired and alert. There’s a tree growing out of his head, his billion dollar genius brain sprouting twigs young and green, and his robots come on Sundays and Thursdays to clip away deadened branches.   
  
He marvels at the bionic hand, he sits and looks, he takes bits and pieces apart, but he never builds another one, or a better one.   
  
Jarvis, of course, keeps his silence.  
  
  
*  
  
  
This is what could have happened: they lived happily ever after in the shabby social housing complex, fucking and sleeping and eating, content with each other and with nothing else. In this world, Bucky Barnes took his bike and rode it all over the city, one handed. Later, he organized bike messengers in a trade union, because he could, and he wanted to, and it was just.   
  
That is what Sam Wilson might tell you, if you found him, sleeping alone in an expensive hotel room, or talking to his favorite cousin Jorell, the tall one, if anyone asked. Maybe he visits his mother, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he wakes up one morning and faces a ghost called Riley, smoke and dust and heartbreak. Maybe he asks the ghost to leave, maybe to stay.   
  
Who’s to know these things.  
  
  
*  
   
  
Peggy Carter won’t tell you anything, she’s in that place people go to once they are no more. Steve would’ve called it heaven, Bucky would’ve called it a grave, six foot under. Maybe they went to her’s and sang a few songs for her, proud Peggy, strong Peggy, a woman like no other, a mourner of the Empire and a lover of soldiers.    
  
Maybe they visit the graves of their wartime friends, hating every second, maybe they break down and cry, dry tears of years gone by like birds in flight. Maybe they leave after a few seconds. Bucky would call it unbearable and Steve would say nothing at all.   
  
Graves are for the dead, and they are alive.  
  
Or are they?  
  
  
*  
  
  
Natalia Romanoff will sit and stare. She will speak to Barton on the phone, his voice both soothing and irritating. What is it that she sees? What color will her hair be the next day, or the day after? What person will she become? Who is she, this strange women? Who is she? Maybe she will track them, until their tracks become meaningless. Maybe she will die of a bullet, out in the open. Maybe she will become a founding member of some new organization, striving for peace, striving for leverage and money and influence.  
  
Maybe she will still dream of the Soldier, of pine needles in her hair, of sex so good it makes her float away on a cloud of nothingness, her body dissolving and regrouping, the tips of her fingers tapping along the bumps of her perfect spine. She will sit in front of a screen, monitoring something or other, and she will become liquid, like the memory she lacks.  
  
She will call Dieter, and another thousand contacts of unknown loyalty, and perhaps they will speak to her, or they won’t.  
  
Who’s to tell.  
  
  
*  
  
  
In another world, in another world, they might have lived, or died somewhere else, married some person or other. In another world, a hacking cough in 1922 might have done the job. I another world, little Sarah Rogers never stepped foot on a ship. In other worlds, they don’t exist, or won’t until later.  
  
Stars are exploding somewhere, somehow. But what is that compared to human suffering, to cold nights with no shelter, spit on your face, endless, meaningless days at work. How can it be, how can it be, how can it be. Such wealth before our eyes, towers scraping the sky, computers talking, thinking, laughing at private jokes.   
  
Donny Lerner will tell you about his things, laid out before him. He won’t tell you about the war in ‘Nam, you just have to ask enough. Maybe he has a tumor growing in his lungs from all the smoke, curling out of his mouth, shrouding him in a veil. Donny, he is not of this world, not of this world filled with embarrassed stares and disgruntled apathy.   
  
You’ll maybe see him on a street corner with his sign, telling you to quit work.  
  
Well, maybe you should.   
  
  
*    
  
  
Oh, Rosalita Hernandez.  
  
You know where the boys have gone to, you just won’t tell. They are building a community center in Chiapas with money you sent from far, far away. You read to your children of Subcomandate Marcos, you still do, every night before the light flickers out.   
  
“The prophecy is here: When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world, but something better,” you’ll tell them, again and again, until their eyes close and their breathing evens out, until only your kind heart is left awake and beating, faster and faster, like you’ve run a thousand miles, back to your mamá, to the jamaica flower in bloom.   
  
  
*  
  
  
This is what could have happened: They took a car and drove out of the cluttered city of their past, west and west and west, until another sea greeted them, warm and blue and utterly foreign. In this world, they sat together from sunrise to sundown, watching the waves give chase, every single day until they stopped. Maybe they turned one hundred years old together, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they will outlive all our stories.   
  
But that is not possible. The stories, they are all of the sea.   
  
  



End file.
